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EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies 
With twelve colored Illustrations repro- 
duced irom Audubon. Square 121110, $1.00. 

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BLUE JAY 
I. Male. 2, j. Females 



EVERYDAY BIRDS 

ELEMENTARY STUDIES 

BY 

BRADFORD TORREY 

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN 

COLORS AFTER AUDUBON, AND 

TWO FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1901 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

APR. 29 1901 


Copyright entry 

CLASS CbXXc. N#. 

COPY B. 



COPYRIGHT, 190I, BV BRADFORD TORREY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Two Little Kings 1 

II. The Chickadee 7 

III. The Brown Creeper 10 

IV. The Brown Thrasher 15 

V. The Butcher-bird 19 

VI. The Scarlet Tanager 22 

VII. The Song Sparrow 26 

VIII. The Field Sparrow and the Chipper . 30 

IX. Some April Sparrows 35 

X. The Rose-breasted Grosbeak . . 40 

XL The Blue Jay 43 

XII. The Kingbird 47 

XIII. The Hummingbird 51 

XIV. The Chimney Swift 56 

XV. NlGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL . . .59 

XVI. The Flicker 64 

XVII. The Bittern 68 

XVIII. Birds for Everybody ..... 82 

XIX. Winter Pensioners 87 

XX. Watching the Procession .... 93 

XXL Southward Bound 99 

Index . 105 

Note. " Winter Pensioners " was originally contributed to Bird-Lore. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 
Blue Jay ..... (page 43) Frontispiece 
Golden-crowned Kinglet . . . . . . 2 ^ 

Chickadee 8 ^^ 

Brown Creeper 12 

Brown Thrasher 16 

Scarlet Tanager . 22 * 

Song Sparrow 26 ^ 

Rose-breasted Grosbeak . . . . . . 40 ^ 

Ruby-throated Hummingbird . . .-■'.. .52 

Nighthawk 60 v 

Whip-poor-will . . . . . . . .62^ 

Flicker 64 ^ 

The illustrations entitled A Downy Woodpecker and A Branch Estab- 
lishment, facing page 88, are from photographs by Mr. Frank M. Chap- 
man and were first printed in Bird-Lore. 



EVERYDAY BIRDS 



TWO LITTLE KINGS 



The largest bird in the United States is the 
California vulture, or condor, which measures 
from tip to tip of its wings nine feet and a half. 
At the other end of the scale are the humming- 
birds, one kind of which, at least, has wings that 
are less than an inch and a half in length. Next 
to these insect-like midgets come the birds which 
have been well named in Latin " Regulus," and 
in English " kinglets," — that is to say, little 
kings. The fitness of the title comes first from 
their tiny size, — the chickadee is almost a giant 
in comparison, — and next from the fact that 
they wear patches of bright color (crowns) on 
their heads. 

Two species of kinglets are found at one season 
or another in nearly all parts of the United 
States, and are known respectively as the golden- 
crown — or goldcrest — and the ruby-crown. 



2 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

The golden-crown has on the top of its head an 
orange or yellow patch (sometimes one, some- 
times the other) bordered with black; the ruby- 
crown wears a very bright red patch, though you 
may look at many specimens without finding it. 
Only part of the birds have it, — the adult males, 
perhaps, — and even those that have it do not 
always display it. The orange or yellow of the 
goldcrest, on the other hand, is worn by all the 
birds, and is never concealed. If you are a be- 
ginner in bird study, uncertain of your species, 
look for the black stripes on the crown. If they 
are not there, and the bird is really a kinglet, it 
must be a ruby-crown. You may know it, also, 
— from the goldcrest, I mean, — by what looks 
like a light-colored ring round the eye. In 
fact, one of the ruby-crown's most noticeable 
peculiarities is a certain bareheaded, large-eyed 
appearance. 

Unless your home is near or beyond the 
northern boundary of the United States, you 
need not look for either kinglet in summer. 
The ruby-crown is to be seen during its migra- 
tions in spring and fall, the goldcrest in fall, 
winter, and spring. 

At any time of the year they are well worth 
knowing. Nobody could look at them without 
admiration j so pretty, so tiny, and so exceed- 




GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLET 

/. Male. 2. Female 



TWO LITTLE KINGS 3 

ingly quick and graceful in their motions. Both 
species are of a prevailing greenish or olive shade, 
with noticeable light-colored wing-bars, and light, 
unstreaked, unspotted under parts. 

The ruby-crown is famous as a singer. A 
genuine music-box, we may call* him. In spring, 
especially, he is often bubbling over with melody ; 
a rapid, wren-like tune, with sundry quirks and 
turns that are all his own; on the whole de- 
cidedly original, with plenty of what musical 
people call accent and a strongly marked rhythm 
or swing. Over and over he goes with it, as if 
he could never have enough; beginning with 
quick, separate, almost guttural notes, and wind- 
ing up with a twittity, twittity, twittity, which, 
once heard, is not likely to be soon forgotten. 

A very pleasing vocalist he surely is; and 
when his extreme smallness is taken into account 
he is fairly to be esteemed a musical prodigy. 
Every one who has written about the song, from 
Audubon down, has found it hard to say enough 
about it. Audubon goes so far as to say that it 
is as powerful as a canary's, and much more 
varied and pleasing. That I must think an ex- 
aggeration ; natural enough, no doubt, under the 
circumstances (romantic surroundings count for 
a good deal in all questions of this kind), but 
still a stretching of the truth. However, I give 



4 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

but my own opinion. Let my readers hear the 
bird, and judge for themselves. They will enjoy 
him, whether or no. Every such new acquaint- 
ance that a man makes is a new source of life- 
long happiness. 

The enormous California vulture is said to be 
almost dumb, having " no vocal apparatus " and 
" emitting only a weak hissing sound." What 
a contrast between him and the ruby-crown, — a 
mere speck of a bird, but with a musical nature 
and the voice of an artist. Precious stuff, they 
say, comes in small packages. Even the young- 
est of us may have noticed that it is always the 
smaller birds that sing. 

But if all the singers are small birds, it is not 
true that all small birds are singers. The golden- 
crowned kinglet, for example, is hardly to be 
classed under that head. The gifts of Providence 
are various, and are somewhat sparingly dealt 
out. One creature receives one gift, another 
creature another, — just as is true of men, women, 
and children. This boy "has an ear," as the 
saying goes. He is naturally musical. Give him 
a chance, and let him not be too much in love 
with something else, and he will make a singer, 
or a player on instruments, or possibly a com- 
poser. His brother has no ear ; he can hardly 
tell Old Hundred from Yankee Doodle. It is 



TWO LITTLE KINGS 5 

useless for him to " take lessons." He can paint, 
perhaps, or invent a machine, or make money, or 
edit a paper, or teach school, or preach sermons, 
or practice medicine ; but he will never win a 
name in the concert room. 

The case o£ the golden-crown is hardly so 
* hopeless as that, I am glad to believe ; for if he 
is not much of a musician now, as he surely is 
not, he is not without some signs of an undevel- 
oped musical capacity. The root of the matter 
seems to be in him. He tries to sing, at any rate, 
and not unlikely, as time goes on, — say in a 
million or two of years, — he may become as 
capable a performer as the ruby-crown is at pre- 
sent. There is no telling what a creature may 
make of himself if his will is good, and he has 
astronomical time in which to work. The dullest 
of us might learn something with a thousand 
years of schooling. 

What you will mostly hear from the goldcrest 
is no tune, but a hurried zee, zee, zee, repeated at 
intervals as he flits about the branches of a tree, 
or, less often, through the mazes of a piece of 
shrubbery. His activity is wonderful, and his 
motions are really as good as music. No dancing 
could be prettier to look at. All you need is 
eyes to see him. But you will have to " look 
sharp." Now he is there for an instant, snatch- 



6 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

ing a morsel or letting out a zee, zee, zee. Now 
he is yonder, resting upon the air, hovering 
against a tuft of pine needles, his wings all in a 
mist, they beat so swiftly. So through the tree 
he goes, and from one tree to another, till pre- 
sently he is gone for good. 

Once in a great while you may find him feed- 
ing among the dry leaves on the ground. Then 
you can really watch him, and had better make 
the most of your opportunity. Or you may 
catch him exploring bushes or low savins, which 
is a chance almost as favorable. The great thing 
is to become familiar with his voice. With that 
help you will find him ten times as often as with- 
out it. He is mostly a bird of the woods, and 
prefers evergreens, though he does not confine 
himself to them. 

If you do not know him already, it will be a 
bright and memorable day — though it be the 
dead of winter — when you first see him and 
are able to call him by his regal name, Regulus 
satrapa. It is a great pity that so common 
and lovely a creature, one of the beauties of the 
world, should be unseen by so many good peo- 
ple. It is true, as we say so often about other 
things, that they do not know what they miss ; 
but they miss a good deal, notwithstanding. 



II 

THE CHICKADEE 

The chickadee, like many other birds, takes 
his name from his notes ; from some of his notes, 
that is to say, for he has many others besides his 
best-known chick-a-dee-dee-dee. His most musi- 
cal effort, regarded by many observers as his 
true song, sounds to most ears like the name 
Phoebe, — a clear, sweet whistle of two or three 
notes, with what musical people call a minor in- 
terval between them. It is so strictly a whistle 
that any boy can imitate it well enough to de- 
ceive not only another boy, but the bird himself. 

In late winter and early spring, especially, 
when the chickadee is in a peculiarly cheerful 
frame of mind, it is very easy to draw him out 
by whistling these notes in his hearing. Some- 
times, however, the sound seems to fret or anger 
him, and instead of answering in kind, he will 
fly near the intruder, scolding dee-dee-dee. 

He remains with us both summer and winter, 
and wears the same colors at all seasons. 



8 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

Perhaps no wild bird is more confiding. If a 
man is at work in the woods in cold weather, and 
at luncheon will take a little pains to feed the 
chickadees that are sure to be more or less about 
him, he will soon have them tame enough to pick 
up crumbs at his feet, and even to take them 
from his hand. 

Better even than crumbs is a bit of mince pie, 
or a piece of suet. I have myself held out a 
piece of suet to a chickadee as I walked through 
the woods, and have had him fly down at once, 
perch on my finger like a tame canary, and fall 
to eating. But he was a bird that another, man, 
a woodcutter of my acquaintance, had tamed in 
the manner above described. 

The chickadee's nest is built in a hole, gener- 
ally in a decayed stump or branch. It is very 
pretty to watch the pair when they are digging 
out the hole. All the chips are carried away and 
dropped at a little distance from the tree, so that 
the sight of them littering the ground may not 
reveal the birds' secret to an enemy. 

Male and female dress alike. The top of the 
head is black — for which reason they are called 
black-capped chickadees, or black-capped tit- 
mice — and the chin is of the same color, while 
the cheeks are clear white. If you are not sure 
that you know the bird, stay near him till he 




CHICKADEE 

/. Male. 2. Female 



THE CHICKADEE 9 

pronounces his own name. He will be pretty 
certain to do it, sooner or later, especially if you 
excite him a little by squeaking or chirping to 
him. 

Although the chickadee is small and delicate- 
looking, he seems not to mind the very coldest 
of weather. Give him enough to eat, and the 
wind may whistle. He picks his food, tiny in- 
sects, insects' eggs, and the like, out of crevices 
in the bark of trees and about the ends of twigs, 
and so is seldom or never without resources. The 
deepest snows do not cover up his dinner-table. 
His worst days, no doubt, are those in which 
everything is covered with sleet. 

One of his prettiest traits is his skill in hang- 
ing back downward from the tip of a swinging 
branch or from the under side of a leaf while in 
search of provender. As a small boy, who had 
probably been to the circus, once said, the chick- 
adee is a "first-rate performer on the flying 
trapeze." 



Ill 

THE BROWN CREEPER 

In the midst of a Massachusetts winter, when 
a man with his eyes open may walk five miles 
over favorable country roads and see only ten or 
twelve kinds of birds, the brown creeper's faint 
zeep is a truly welcome sound. He is a very 
little fellow, very modestly dressed, without, a 
bright feather on him, his lower parts being 
white and his upper parts a mottling of brown 
and white, such as a tailor might call a " pepper 
and salt mixture." 

The creeper's life seems as quiet as his colors. 
You will find him by overhearing his note some- 
where on one side of you as you pass. Now 
watch him. He is traveling rather quickly, with 
an alert, business-like air, up the trunk of a tree 
in a spiral course, hitching along inch by inch, 
hugging the bark, and every little while stop- 
ping to probe a crevice of it with his long, 
curved, sharply pointed bill. He is in search 
of food, — insects' eggs, grubs, and what not ; 
morsels so tiny that it need not surprise us to see 



THE BROWN CREEPER 11 

him spending the whole day in satisfying his 
hunger. 

There is one thing to be said for such a life : 
the bird is never without something to take up 
his mind. In fact, if he enjoys the pleasures of 
the table half as well as some human beings seem 
to do, his life ought to be one of the happiest 
imaginable. 

How flat and thin he looks, and how perfectly 
his colors blend with the grays and browns of 
the mossy bark ! No wonder it is easy for us to 
pass near him without knowing it. We under- 
stand now what learned people mean when they 
talk about the " protective coloration " of ani- 
mals. A hawk flying overhead, on the lookout 
for game, must have hard work to see this bit 
of a bird clinging so closely to the bark as to be 
almost a part of it. 

And if a hawk does pass, you may be pretty 
sure the creeper will see him, and will flatten 
himself still more tightly against the tree and 
stay as motionless as the bark itself. He needs 
neither to fight nor to run away. His strength, 
as the prophet said, is to sit still. 

But look ! As the creeper comes to the upper 
part of the tree, where the bark is less furrowed 
than it is below, and therefore less likely to con- 
ceal the scraps of provender that he is in search 



12 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

of, he suddenly lets go his hold and flies down 
to the foot of another tree, and begins again to 
creep upward. If you keep track of him, you 
will see him do this hour after hour. He never 
walks down. Up, up, he goes, and if you look 
sharply enough, you will see that whenever he 
pauses he makes use of his sharp, stiff tail- 
feathers as a rest — a kind of camp-stool, as it 
were, or, better still, a bracket. He is built for 
his work; color, bill, feet, tail-feathers — all 
were made on purpose for him. 

He is a native of the northern country, and 
therefore to most readers of this book he is a 
winter bird only. If you know his voice, you 
will hear him twenty times for once that you see 
him. If you know neither him nor his voice, it 
will be worth your while to make his acquaint- 
ance. 

When you come upon a little bunch of chick- 
adees flitting through the woods, listen for a 
quick, lisping note that is something like theirs, 
but different. It may be the creeper's, for al- 
though he seems an unsocial fellow, seldom flock- 
ing with birds of his own kind, he is fond of the 
chickadee's cheerful companionship. 

To see him and hear his zeep, you would never 
take him for a songster ; but there is no telling 
by the looks of a bird how well he can sing. In 




BROWN CREEPER 
/. Male. 2. Female 



THE BROWN CREEPER 13 

fact, plainly dressed birds are, as a rule, the best 
musicians. The very handsome ones have no 
need to charm with the voice. And our modest 
little creeper has a song, and a fairly good one ; 
one that answers his purpose, at all events, al- 
though it may never make him famous. In 
springtime it may be heard now and then even 
in a place like Boston Common ; but of course 
you must go where the birds pair and nest if you 
would hear them at their finest ; for birds, like 
other people, sing best when they feel happiest. 

The brown creeper's nest used to be something 
of a mystery. It was sought for in woodpeck- 
ers' holes. Now it is known that as a general 
thing it is built behind a scale of loose bark on 
a dead tree, between the bark and the trunk. 
Ordinarily, if not always, it will be found under a 
flake that is loose at the bottom instead of at the 
top. Into such a place the female bird packs 
tightly a mass of twigs and strips of the soft in- 
ner bark of trees, and on the top of this prepares 
her nest and lays her eggs. Her mate flits to 
and fro, keeping her company, and once in a 
while cheering her with a song, but so far as has 
yet been discovered he takes no hand in the work 
itself. It is quite possible that the female, who 
is to occupy the nest, prefers to have her own 
way in the construction of it. 



14 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

After the young ones are hatch ed, at all events, 
the father bird's behavior leaves nothing to be 
complained of. He " comes to time/' as we say, 
in the most loyal manner. In and out of the 
nest he and the mother go, feeding their hungry 
charges, making their entry and exit always at 
the same point, through the merest crack of a 
door, between the overhanging bark and the tree, 
just above the nest. It is a very pretty bit of 
family life. 

It would be hard to imagine a nest better con- 
cealed from a bird's natural enemies, especially 
when, as is often the case, the tree stands jn 
water on the edge of a stream or lake. And 
not only is the nest wonderfully well hidden, but 
it is perfectly sheltered from rain, as it would not 
be if it were built under a strip of bark that was 
peeled from above. All in all, we must respect 
the simple, demure-looking creeper as a very 
clever architect. 



IV 

THE BROWN THRASHER 

The brown thrasher — called also the brown 
thrush — -is a bird considerably longer than a 
robin, with a noticeably long tail and a long, 
curved bill. His upper parts are reddish brown 
or cinnamon color, and his lower parts white or 
whitish, boldly streaked with black. You will 
find him in hedgerows, in scrub-lands, and about 
the edges of woods, where he keeps mostly on or 
near the ground. His general manner is that of 
a creature who wishes nothing else so much as to 
escape notice. u Only let me alone," he seems 
to say. If he sees you coming, as he pretty cer- 
tainly will, he dodges into the nearest thicket or 
barberry-bush, and waits for you to pass. 

Farmers know him as the " planting-bird." 
In New England he makes his appearance with 
commendable punctuality between the twentieth 
of April and the first of May ; and while the 
farmer is planting his garden, the thrasher en- 
courages him with song. One man, who was 
planting beans, imagined that the bird said, 



16 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

"Drop it. drop it ! Cover it up, cover it up ! " 
Perhaps he did. It was good advice, anyhow. 

In his own way the thrasher is one of the 
great singers of the world. He is own cousin to 
the famous mockingbird, and at the South, where 
he and the mocker may be heard singing side by 
side, — and so much alike that it is hard to tell 
one from the other, — he is known as the " brown 
mocking-bird." He would deserve the title but 
for one thing — he does not mock. In that re- 
spect he falls far short of his gray cousin, who not 
only has all the thrasher's gift of original song, 
but a most amazing faculty of imitation, as every 
one knows who has heard even a caged mocking- 
bird running over the medley of notes he has 
picked up here and there and carefully rehearsed 
and remembered. The thrasher's song is a med- 
ley, but not a medley of imitations. 

I have said that the thrasher keeps near the 
ground. Such is his habit ; but there is one 
exception. When he sings he takes the very 
top of a tree, although usually it is not a tall 
one. There he stands by the half-hour together, 
head up and tail down, pouring out a flood of 
music ; sounds of all sorts, high notes and low 
notes, smooth notes and rough notes, all jum- 
bled together in the craziest fashion, as if the 
musician were really beside himself. 




BROWN THRASHER 
/, 2 y J. Males. 4. Female 



THE BROWN THRASHER 17 

It is a performance worth buying a ticket for 
and going miles to hear ; but it is to be heard 
without price on the outskirts of almost any vil- 
lage in the United States east of the Rocky 
Mountains and south of Maine. You must go 
out at the right time, however, for the bird sings 
but a few weeks in the year, although he remains 
in New England almost six months, or till the 
middle of October. He is one of the birds that 
every one should know, since it is perfectly easy 
to identify him ; and once known, he is never to 
be forgotten, or to be confounded with anything 
else. 

The thrasher's nest is a rude, careless-looking 
structure, made of twigs, roots, and dry leaves, 
and is to be looked for on the ground, or in a 
bush not far above it. Often it has so much the 
appearance of a last year's affair that one is 
tempted to pass it as unworthy of notice. I have 
been fooled in that way more than once. 

The bird sits close, as the saying is, and as 
she stares at you with her yellow eyes, full at 
once of courage and fear, you will need a hard 
heart to disturb her. Sometimes she will really 
show fight, and she has been known to drive a 
small boy off the field. Her whistle after she 
has been frightened from her eggs or nestlings 
is one of the most pathetic sounds in nature. I 



18 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

should feel sorry for the boy who could hear it 
without pity. 

Besides this mournful whistle, the thrasher 
has a note almost exactly like a smacking kiss, 
— very realistic, — and sometimes, especially at 
dusk, an uncanny, ghostly whisper, that seems 
meant expressly to suggest the presence of some- 
thing unearthly and awful. So far as I am 
aware, there is no other bird-note like it. I have 
no doubt that many a superstitious person has 
taken to his heels on hearing it from the bushes 
along a lonesome roadside after nightfall. 

Except in the spring, indeed, there is little 
about the thrasher's appearance or behavior to 
suggest pleasant thoughts. To me, at any rate, 
he seems a creature of chronic low spirits. The 
world has used him badly, and he cannot get 
over it. He is almost the only bird I ever see 
without a little inspiration of cheerfulness. Per- 
haps I misjudge him. 

Let my young readers make his acquaintance 
on their own account, if they have not already 
done so, and find him a livelier creature than I 
have described him, if they can. 



THE BUTCHER-BIRD 

" Butcher-bird " is not a very pretty name, 
but it is expressive and appropriate, and so is 
likely to stick quite as long as the more bookish 
word " shrike/' which is the bird's other title. 
It comes from its owner's habit of impaling the 
carcasses of its prey upon thorns, as a butcher 
hangs upon a hook the body of a pig or other 
animal that he has slaughtered. 

In a place like the Public Garden of Boston, 
if a shrike happens to make it his hunting-ground 
for a week or two, you may find here and there 
in the hawthorn-trees the body of a mouse or the 
headless trunk of an English sparrow spitted upon 
a thorn. Grasshoppers are said to be treated 
in a similar manner, but I have never met with 
the bird's work in the grasshopper season. 

The shrike commonly seen in the Northern 
States is a native of the far north, and comes 
down to our latitude only in cold weather. He 
travels singly, and if he finds a place to suit him, 
a place where the living is good, he will often 



20 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

remain almost in the same spot for weeks 
together. 

In size and appearance he resembles the mock- 
ingbird. His colors are gray, black, and white, 
his tail is long, and his bill is hooked like a 
hawk's. 

He likes a perch from which he can see a good 
distance about him. A telegraph wire answers 
his purpose very well, but his commonest seat is 
the very tip of a tallish tree. If you look across 
a field in winter and descry a medium-sized bird 
swaying on the topmost twig of a lonesome tree, 
balancing himself by continual tiltings of his 
long tail, you may set him down as most likely 
a butcher-bird. 

His flight is generally not far from the ground, 
but as he draws near the tree in which he means 
to alight, he turns suddenly upward. It would 
be surprising to see him alight on one of the 
lower branches, or anywhere, indeed, except at 
the topmost point. 

Small birds are all at once scarce and silent 
when the shrike appears. Sometimes in his 
hunger he will attack a bird heavier than him- 
self. I had once stopped to look at a flicker in a 
roadside apple-tree, when I suddenly noticed a 
butcher-bird not far off. At the same moment, 
as it seemed, the butcher-bird caught sight of the 
flicker, and made a swoop toward him. The 



THE BUTCHER-BIRD 21 

flicker, somewhat to my surprise, showed no sign 
of panic, or even of fear* He simply moved 
aside, as much as to say, " Oh, stop that ! Don't 
bother me ! " How the affair would have re- 
sulted, I cannot tell. To my regret, the shrike at 
that moment seemed to become aware of a man's 
presence, and flew away, leaving the woodpecker 
to pursue his exploration of the apple-tree at his 
leisure. 

The shrike has a very curious habit of singing, 
or of trying to sing, in the disjointed manner of 
a catbird. I have many times heard him thus 
engaged, and can bear witness that some of his 
tones are really musical. Some people have sup- 
posed that at such times he is trying to decoy 
small birds, but to me the performance has al- 
ways seemed like music, or an attempt at music, 
rather than strategy. 

Southern readers may be presumed to be fa- 
miliar with another shrike, known as the logger- 
head. As I have seen him in Florida he is a very 
tame, unsuspicious creature, nesting in the shade- 
trees of towns. The " French mocking-bird," a 
planter told me he was called. Mr. Chapman 
has seen one fly fifty yards to catch a grasshop- 
per which, to all appearance, he had sighted 
before quitting his perch. The power of flight 
is not the only point as to which birds have the 
advantage of human beings. 



VI 

THE SCARLET TANAGER 

When I began to learn the birds, I was living 
in a large city. One of the first things I did, 
after buying a book, was to visit a cabinet of 
mounted specimens — " stuffed birds/' as we 
often call them. Such a wonderful and confus- 
ing variety as there was to my ignorant eyes ! 
Among them I remarked especially a gorgeous 
scarlet creature with black wings and a black tail. 
It was labeled the scarlet tanager. So far as I 
was concerned, it could not have looked more 
foreign if it had come from Borneo. My book 
told me that it was common in Massachusetts. It 
might be, I thought, but I had never seen it 
there. And a bird so splendid as that ! Bright 
enough to set the woods on fire ! How could I 
have missed it ? 

Well, there came a Saturday, with its half- 
holiday for clerks, and I went into the country, 
where I betook myself to the woods of my native 
village, the woods wherein I had rambled all the 
years of my boyhood. And that afternoon, be- 




SCARLET TANAGER 
i. Male. 2. Female 



THE SCARLET TANAGER 23 

fore I came out of them, I put my opera-glass on 
two of those wonderful scarlet and black birds. 
It was a day to be remembered. 

Since that time, of course, I have seen many 
like them. In one sense, their beauty has become 
to, me an old story ; but I hope that I have set 
here and there a reader on a hunt that has been 
as happily rewarded as mine was on that bright 
summer afternoon. In one respect, the beginner 
has a great advantage over an old hand. He has 
the pleasure of more excitement and surprise. 

The bird to be looked for is a little longer than 
a bluebird, of a superb scarlet color except for 
its wings and tail, which, as I have said, are jet- 
black. I speak of the male in full spring costume. 
His mate does not show so much as a red feather, 
but is greenish yellow, or yellowish green, with 
dark — not black — wings and tail. 

You may see the tanager once in a while in 
the neighborhood of your house, if the grounds 
are set with shade-trees, but for the most part 
he lives in woods, especially in hard woods of a 
fairly old growth. 

One of the first things for you to do, with him 
as with all birds, is to acquaint yourself with his 
call-notes and his song. The call is of two syl- 
lables, and sounds like chip-chirr. It is easily 
remembered after you have once seen the bird in 



24 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

the act of uttering it. The song is much in the 
manner of the robin's, but less smooth and flow- 
ing. I have often thought, and sometimes said, 
that it is just such a song as the robin might 
give us if he were afflicted with what people call 
a " hoarse cold." The bird sings as if his whole 
heart were engaged, but at the same time in a 
noticeably broken and short-winded style. 

The oftener you hear him, the easier you will 
find it to distinguish him from a robin, although 
at first you may find yourself badly at a loss. 
A boy that can tell any one of twenty playmates 
by the tones of his voice alone will need nothing 
but practice and attention to do the same for a 
great part of the sixty or seventy kinds of com- 
mon birds living in the woods and fields about 
him. 

The tanager's nest is built in a tree, on the 
flat of a level branch, so to speak, generally 
toward the end. Sometimes, at any rate, it is a 
surprisingly loose, carelessly constructed thing, 
through the bottom of which one can see the 
blue or bluish eggs while standing on the ground 
underneath. 

It must be plain to any one that the mother 
bird, in her dull greenish dress, is much less 
easily seen, and therefore much less in danger, as 
she sits brooding, than she would be if she wore 



THE SCARLET TANAGER 25 

the flaming scarlet feathers that render her mate 
so handsome. 

Southern readers will know also another kind 
of tanager, not red and black, but red all over. 
He, too, is a great beauty, although if the ques- 
tion were left to me, I could not give him the 
palm over his more northern relative. The red 
of the southern bird is of a different shade 
— " rose-red " or " vermilion," the books call 
it. He sings like the scarlet tanager, but in a 
smoother voice. Although he is a red bird, he 
is not to be confounded with the southern red- 
bird. The latter, better known as the cardinal 
grosbeak, is a thick-billed bird of the sparrow and 
finch family. He is frequently seen in cages, 
and is a royal whistler. 

The scarlet tanager — the male in red and 
black plumage — is not to be mistaken for any- 
thing else in the Eastern States. Once see him, 
and you will always know him. For that reason 
he is an excellent subject for the beginner. He 
passes the winter in Central or South America, 
and returns to New England in the second week 
of May. He makes his appearance in full dress, 
but later in the season changes it for one resem- 
bling pretty closely the duller plumage of his 
mate. 



VII 

THE SONG SPARROW 

Sparrows are of many kinds, and in a gen- 
eral way the different kinds look so much alike 
that the beginner in bird study is apt to find 
them confusing, if not discouraging. They will 
try his patience, no matter how sharp and clever 
he may think himself, and unless he is much 
cleverer than the common run of humanity, he 
will make a good many mistakes before he gets 
to the end of them. 

One of the best and commonest of them all is 
the song sparrow. His upper parts are mottled, 
of course, since he is a sparrow. His light- 
colored breast is sharply streaked, and in the 
middle of it the streaks usually run together and 
form a blotch. His outer tail-feathers are not 
white, and there is no yellow on the wings or 
about the head. These last points are mentioned 
in order to distinguish him from two other spar- 
rows with streaked breasts — the vesper sparrow 
and the savanna. 

By the middle of March song sparrows reach 




SONG SPARROW 

/. Male. 2. Female 



THE SONG SPARROW 27 

New England in crowds, — along with robins 
and red-winged blackbirds, — and are to be 
heard singing on all hands, especially in the 
neighborhood o£ water. They remain until late 
autumn, and here and there one will be found 
even in midwinter. 

The song, for which this sparrow is particu- 
larly distinguished, is a bright and lively strain, 
nothing very great in itself, perhaps, but thrice 
welcome for being heard so early in the season, 
when the ear is hungry after the long winter 
silence. Its chief distinction, however, is its 
amazing variety. Not only do no two birds sing 
precisely alike, but the same bird sings many 
tunes. 

Of this latter fact, which I have known some 
excellent people to be skeptical about, you can 
readily satisfy yourself, — and there is nothing 
like knowing a thing at first hand, — if you will 
take the pains to keep a singer under your eye 
at the height of the musical season. You will 
find that he repeats one strain for perhaps a 
dozen times, without the change of a note ; then 
suddenly he comes out with a song entirely dif- 
ferent. This second song he will in turn drop 
for a third, and so on. The bird acts, for all the 
world, as if he were singing hymns, of so many 
verses each, one after another. 



28 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

It is really a wonderful performance. There 
are very few kinds of birds that do anything like 
it. Of itself it is enough to make the song spar- 
row famous, and it is well worth any one's while 
to hear it and see it done. Nobody can see it 
without believing that birds have a true appre- 
ciation of music. They are better off than some 
human beings, at all events. They know one 
tune from another. 

A lady correspondent was good enough to 
send me, not long ago, a pleasing account of the 
doings of a pair of song sparrows, which, as she 
says, came to her for six seasons. 

" One year," she writes, " they happened to 
build where I could watch them from the win- 
dow, and they did a very curious thing. They 
fed the little birds with all sorts of worms of dif- 
ferent colors until they were ready to leave the 
nest ; then the male brought a pure white moth 
and held it near the nest, which was in some 
stems of a rosebush a few inches from the 
ground, on a level with the lower rail of a picket 
fence. 

" One of the little birds came out of the nest 
at once and followed its parent, who went side- 
wise, always holding the dazzling white morsel 
just out of the youngster's reach. In this man- 
ner they crossed the lane, climbed the inclined 



THE SONG SPARROW 29 

plane of a woodpile, and passed through a fence 
and across a vegetable garden into an asparagus 
bed, in which miniature forest the little traveler 
received and ate the moth. 

"Another nest was built on the bank of a 
brook on the farther side of a road. Out of 
this nest I saw two little fellows coaxed with 
these snow-white moths, and led across the dusty 
road into a hedge." 

One or two experiences of this kind are suffi- 
cient reward for a good deal of patient obser- 
vation. The singer of this pair of birds, my 
correspondent says, had ten distinct songs, one 
of them exceedingly beautiful and peculiar. 

The song sparrow's nest is usually built on 
the ground, and the bird is one of several kinds 
that are known indiscriminately by country 
people as ground sparrows. 

Song sparrows seem to be of a pretty nervous 
disposition, to judge from their behavior. One 
of their noticeable characteristics is a twitching, 
up-and-down, " pumping " motion of the tail, as 
they dash into cover on being disturbed. 

People who live in the Southern States see 
these birds only in the cooler part of the year, 
but must have abundant opportunity to hear 
them sing as spring approaches. 



VIII 

THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 

All beginners in bird study find the sparrow 
family a hard one. There are so many kinds 
of sparrows, and the different kinds look so con- 
fusingly alike. How shall I ever be able to tell 
them apart ? the novice says to himself. 

Well, there is no royal road to such learning, 
it may as well be confessed. But there is a road, 
for all that, and a pretty good one, — the road 
of patience ; and there is much pleasure to be 
had in following it. If you know one sparrow, 
be it only the so-called " English," you have 
made a beginning. 

If you know the English sparrow, I say ; for, 
strange as it may seem, I find numbers of peo- 
ple who do not. Take the average inhabitant 
of any of our large cities into the country, and 
let him come upon an English sparrow in a way- 
side hedge, and there are three chances to one 
that he will not know with certainty what to 
call it. Quite as likely as not he has never 
noticed that there are two kinds of English spar- 



THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 31 

rows, very differently feathered — the male and 
the female. 

In a short chapter like this I am not going to 
attempt a miracle. If you read it to the end, 
never so carefully, you will not be prepared to 
name all the sparrows at sight. As I said be- 
fore, they are a hard set. My wish now is to 
speak of two of the smallest and commonest. 

One of these is called sometimes the chipping 
sparrow, sometimes the chipper, and sometimes 
— much less often — the doorstep sparrow. Per- 
sonally, I like the last name best, — perhaps be- 
cause I invented it. Scientific men, who prefer 
for excellent reasons to have their own names 
for things, call him Spizella socialis — that is to 
say, the familiar or social little spiza, or sparrow. 
The idea of littleness, some young readers may 
not know, is contained in the termination ella, 
which is what grammarians call a diminutive. 
Umbrella, for instance, is literally a small umbra, 
or shade. 

With most readers of this book the chipping 
sparrow is a bird of spring, summer, and autumn. 
For the winter he retires to our extreme South- 
ern States and to Mexico. If you live in Massa- 
chusetts, you may begin to be on the watch for 
him by the 5th of April. If your home is farther 
south, you should see him somewhat earlier. 



32 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

Perhaps you will know him by this brief de- 
scription : a very small, slender sparrow, with a 
dark chestnut-red crown, a black forehead, a 
black bill, and plain — unstreaked and unspotted 
— under parts. 

His ordinary note, or call, is a chip (whence 
his name), and his song is a very dry, tuneless, 
monotonous, long-drawn chipjiy-chijipy-chippy, 
uttered so fast as to sound almost like a trill. 
You may like the bird never so well, but if you 
have any idea of music, you will never call him a 
fine singer. What he and his mate think about 
the matter there is, of course, no telling. IJe 
seems to be very much in earnest, at all events. 

He is a social bird, I say. You will not have 
to go far afield or into the woods in search of 
him. If you live in any sort of country place, 
with a bit of garden and a few shrubs and fruit 
trees, a pair of chippers will be likely to find you 
out. Their nest will be built in a tree or bush, 
a small structure neatly lined with hair, and in 
due time it will contain four or five eggs, blue 
or greenish blue, with brown spots. 

Our other bird is of the chipper's size, and, 
like him, has unstreaked and unspotted lower 
parts. His bill is of a light color, " reddish 
brown," one book says, "pale reddish," says an- 
other. This is one of the principal marks for 



THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 33 

the beginner to notice. Another is a wash of 
buff, or yellowish brown, on the sides of the 
breast. The upper parts, too, are in general 
much lighter than the dripper's. 

You will not be likely often to find this bird 
in your garden or about the lawn. He is called 
the field sparrow, but he lives mostly in dry old 
pastures, partly overgrown with bushes and trees. 
His nest is placed on the ground, or in a low 
bush, and is often lined wholly or in part with 
hair. He and the chipper belong to what is 
called the same genus. That is to say, the two 
are so nearly related that they have the same 
surname. The chipper is Spizella socialis, the 
field sparrow is Spizella pusilla; just as two 
brothers will have one name in common, say, 
Jones, William, and Jones, Andrew. 

The chipper is a favorite on account of his 
familiar, friendly ways. The field sparrow de- 
serves to be known and loved for his music. 
Few birds sing better, in my opinion, though 
many make more display and are more talked 
about. The beauty of the song is in its sweet- 
ness, simplicity, and perfect taste. It begins 
with three or four longer notes, which run at 
once into quicker and shorter ones, either on the 
same pitch or a little higher. Really the strain 
is almost too simple to make a description of : a 



34 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

simple line of pure melody, one may say. You 
must hear it for yourself. Sometimes the bird 
gives it out double, so to speak, catching it up 
again just as he seems ready to finish. The tone 
is the clearest of whistles, and the whole effect is 
most delightful and soothing. It is worth any- 
body's while to spend a season or two in bird 
study, if only to learn this and half a dozen more 
pieces of our common wild-bird music. 

The field sparrow's times of arrival and depar- 
ture are practically the same as the chipper' s. 
Neither bird is hard to see, or very hard to dis- 
tinguish ; a bit of patience and an opera-gl^ss 
will do the business ; though you may have to 
puzzle awhile over either of them before making 
quite sure of your knowledge. In bird study, as 
in any other, we learn by correcting our own 
mistakes. 



IX 

SOME APRIL SPARROWS 

For the first three weeks of April the ornithol- 
ogist goes comparatively seldom into the woods. 
Millions of birds have come up from the South, 
but the forest is still almost deserted. May, with 
its hosts of warblers, will bring a grand change 
in this respect; meanwhile the sparrows are in 
the ascendant, and we shall do well to follow the 
road for the most part, though with frequent 
excursions across fields and into gardens and or- 
chards. Of eighty-four species of birds seen by 
me in April, a year ago, twenty-one were water 
birds, and of the remaining sixty-three, twenty, 
or almost one third, were members of the spar- 
row family, while only five were warblers. In 
May, on the other hand, out of one hundred and 
twenty-five species seen twenty-three were war- 
blers, and only eighteen were sparrows. To re- 
present the case fairly, however, the comparison 
should be by individuals rather than by species, 
and for such a comparison I have no adequate 
data. My own opinion is that of all the birds 



36 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

commonly seen in April, more than half, perhaps 
as many as four fifths, are members of the spar- 
row family. There are days, indeed, when the 
song sparrows alone seem to outnumber all other 
birds, and other days when the same is true of 
the snowbirds. 

The large and noble sparrow family, which 
includes not only the sparrows, commonly so 
called, but finches, grosbeaks, crossbills, snow- 
birds, buntings, and the like, is represented in 
North America by more than ninety species, and 
in Massachusetts by about forty. It is preem- 
inently a musical family, and, with us at least, 
April is the best month of the twelve in which 
to appreciate its lyrical efforts, notwithstanding 
the fact that one of its most distinguished song- 
sters, the rose-breasted grosbeak, is still absent. 

Among the more gifted of its April represent- 
atives are the fox sparrow, — so named from his 
color, — the purple finch, the song sparrow, the 
vesper sparrow, the tree sparrow, the field spar- 
row, and the white-throated sparrow — - seven 
common birds, every one of them deserving to 
be known by any who care for sweet sounds. 

One of the seven, the purple finch, also called 
the linnet, is unlike all the others, and easily 
excels them all in the fluency and copiousness 
of his music. He is readily distinguishable — in 



SOME APRIL SPARROWS 37 

adult male plumage — as a sparrow whose head 
and neck appear to have been dipped in carmine 
ink, or perhaps in pokeberry juice. His song is 
a prolonged, rapid, unbroken warble, which he 
is much given to delivering while on the wing, 
hovering ecstatically and singing as if he would 
pour out his very soul. He is a familiar bird, a 
lover of orchards and roadside trees, but is not 
so universally distributed, probably, as most of 
the other species I have named. 

In contrast with the purple finch, all the six 
sparrows here mentioned with him have brief and 
rather formal songs. Those of the fox sparrow 
and the tree sparrow bear a pretty strong resem- 
blance to each other, especially as to cadence or 
inflection ; the song sparrow's and the vesper 
sparrow's are still more closely alike, and will 
almost certainly confuse the novice, while those 
of the field sparrow and the white-throat are each 
quite unique. 

The fox sparrow visits Massachusetts as a 
migrant only, and the same might be said of the 
white-throat, only that it breeds in Berkshire 
County and single birds are often seen in the 
eastern part of the State during the winter. The 
tree sparrow is a winter resident, going far north 
to rear its young, and the remaining four species 
are with us for the summer. 



38 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

The fox sparrow is to be heard from the 20th 
of March (I speak roughly) to the middle of April. 
In respect to voice and cadence, he is to me the 
finest of our sparrows proper, though I do not 
think him so finished an artist as the song and 
vesper sparrows. He may be recognized by his 
superior size and his bright rusty-red (reddish 
brown) color. Indeed, these two features give 
him at first sight the appearance of a thrush. He 
is one of the sparrows - — like the song, the vesper, 
the savanna, and the Ipswich — which are thickly 
streaked upon the breast. 

The tree sparrow passes the winter with us r as 
I have said, but abounds only during the two 
migrations. He is in full song for the greater 
part of April. His distinctive marks are a bright 
reddish (" chestnut ") crown, conspicuous white 
wing-bars, and an obscure round blotch in the 
middle of his unstreaked breast. 

The white-throat, commonly a very abundant 
migrant, arrives about the 20th of April and re- 
mains till about the middle of May. His loud, 
clear song is remarkable for its peculiar and 
strongly marked rhythm. It consists of two com- 
paratively long introductory notes, followed by 
three sets of triplets in monotone — like see, see, 
peabody, peabody, pedbody. This bird, too, 
perplexing as the sparrows are usually thought 



SOME APRIL SPARROWS 39 

to be, is perfectly well marked, with a white 
throat (not merely a white chin, as in the swamp 
sparrow) and a broad white stripe on each side 
of the crown, turning to yellow in front of the 
eyes. The crown itself is dark, with a white line 
through the middle, and each wing is adorned 
with two white bars. In size the white-throat 
comes next to the fox sparrow. 

The song sparrow and the vesper sparrow not 
only sing alike, but look alike. The latter may 
be told at once, however, by his white outer tail 
feathers, which show as he flies. These are two 
of our commonest and worthiest birds. The ves- 
per sparrow, more generally known, perhaps, as 
the bay-winged bunting, likes a drier field than 
the song sparrow, and is especially noticeable for 
his trick of running along the path or the road 
directly in front of the traveler. 



X 

THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 

There is never a May passes, of recent years, 
but some one comes to me, or writes to me, to 
inquire about a wonderfully beautiful bird that 
he has just seen for the first time. He does 
hope I can tell him what it is. It is a pretty 
large bird, he goes on to say, — but not so long 
as a robin, he thinks, if I question him, — mostly 
black and white, but with such a splendid rosy 
patch on his breast or throat ! What can it be ? 
He had no idea that anything so handsome was 
ever to be seen in these parts. 

If all the questions that people ask about 
birds were as easily answered as this one, I should 
be thankful. It is a rose-breasted grosbeak, I 
tell the inquirer. Perhaps he noticed that its bill 
was uncommonly stout. If he did, the fact is 
exceptional, for somehow the shape of the bill is 
a point which the average person seems very sel- 
dom to notice, although it is highly important. 
Anyhow, the rosebreast's beak is most decidedly 
" gross." And he is every whit as beautiful as 




ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 
/. Males: 2. Female. 3. Young Mile 



THE KOSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 41 

my inquirer represents him to be. In that re- 
spect he ranks with the oriole and the scarlet 
tanager. 

He is distinguished also for his song, which is 
a flowing warble, wonderfully smooth and sweet. 
To most ears it bears a likeness to the robin's 
song, but it is beyond comparison more fluent and 
delicious, although not more hearty. Keep your 
ear open for such a voice, — by the middle of 
May if you live in New England, a little earlier 
if your home is farther south, — and you will be 
likely to hear it ; for at that time the bird is not 
only common, but a very free singer. 

In addition to his song, the rosebreast has 
a short call-note, which sounds very much like 
the squeak of a pair of rusty shears — a kind 
of hie, which you will find no difficulty about 
remembering if you have once learned it. His 
nest is generally built in a bush, often within 
reach of the hand, but I have seen it well up in 
a rather tall tree. The two birds spell each 
other in brooding, and are not only mutually 
affectionate, but very brave. I have known the 
mother bird to keep her seat even when I took 
hold of the bush below the nest and drew her 
almost against my face. She, by the way, is 
a very modestly dressed body, being not only 
without the rose-color, but without the clear 



42 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

contrast of black and white. To look at her, 
you might take her for a large sparrow. 

The rose-color of the male, it should be said, 
is not confined to the patch on the breast, but is 
found also on the lining of the wings, where it 
is mostly unnoticed by the world, but where his 
mate, of course, cannot help admiring it as he 
flutters about her ; for it is certain that female 
birds have a good eye for color, and believe that 
fine feathers help, at least, to make fine birds. 
The shade is of the brightest and most exquisite, 
and the total effect of the male's plumage — jet 
black, pure white, and vivid rose-red — is quite 
beyond praise. 

The birds, happily, are not shy, and prefer 
a fairly open or broken country rather than a 
dense wood. Last season one sang day after 
day directly under my windows, and undoubt- 
edly had a mate and a nest somewhere close by. 
The male, it should be added, has the very 
pretty though dangerous-seeming habit of sing- 
ing as he sits upon the eggs. 



XI 

THE BLUE JAY 

Some years ago, as the story conies to me, two 
collectors of birds met by accident in South 
America, one of them from Europe, the other 
from the United States. " There is one bird that 
I would rather see than any other in the world/' 
said the European. " It is the handsomest of 
all the birds that fly, to my thinking, although 
I know it only in the cabinet. You have it in 
North America, but I suppose you do not often 
see it. I mean the blue jay." 

What the American answered in words, I do 
not know; but I am pretty confident that he 
smiled. The European might almost as well 
have said that he supposed Boston people did 
not often see an English sparrow. Not that the 
blue jay swarms everywhere as the foreign spar- 
row swarms in our American cities ; but it is so 
common, so noisy, so conspicuous, and so unmis- 
takable, that it is, or ought to be, almost an 
everyday sight to all country dwellers. 

Strange as it seems, however, I find many 



44 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

people who do not know the jay when they see 
it. In late winter, say toward the end of Febru- 
ary, when I begin to be on the lookout for the 
first bluebird of the year, I am all but certain to 
have word brought to me by some one of the 
village school-teachers that bluebirds have al- 
ready come. Johnny This or Jimmy That saw 
one near his house several weeks ago! That 
" several weeks ago " makes me suspicious, and 
on following up the matter I discover that John 
and James have seen a large blue bird, larger 
than a robin, with some black and white on him 
— all white underneath — and wearing a tall 
crest or topknot. Then I know that they have 
mistaken a blue bird for a bluebird. They have 
seen a blue jay, a bird of a very different feather. 
He has been with us all winter, as he always is, 
and has been in sight from my windows daily. 
So easy is it for boys and men to guess at things, 
and guess wrong. 

The jay is a relative of the crow, and has 
much of the crow's cleverness, with more than 
the crow's beauty. Like the crow, if he has an 
errand near houses, he makes a point of doing it 
in the early morning before the folks who live 
in the houses have begun to stir about. In fact, 
he knows us, in some respects at least, better 
than we know him, and habitually takes advan- 






THE BLUE JAY 45 

tage of what no doubt seems to him a custom of 
very late rising on the part of human beings. 

Among small birds of all sorts he bears a de- 
cidedly bad name. In nesting time you may 
hear them uttering a chorus of loud and bitter 
laments as often as he appears among them. 
Their eggs and young are in danger, and they 
join forces to worry him and drive him away. 
One bird sounds the alarm, another hears him 
and hastens to see what is going on, and in a 
few minutes the whole neighborhood is awake. 
And it stays awake till the jay moves off. After 
that piece of evidence, you do not need to see 
him doing mischief. The little birds' behavior 
is sufficiently convincing. As Thoreau said, the 
presence of a trout in the milk is something like 
proof. 

And jays, in their turn, club together against 
enemies larger than themselves. Last autumn 
I was walking through the woods with a friend, 
— a city schoolmaster eager for knowledge, as 
every schoolmaster ought to be, — when we heard 
a great screaming of blue jays from a swampy 
thicket on our right hand. 

" Now what do you suppose the birds mean 
by all that outcry ? " said my friend. 

I answered that very likely there was a hawk 
or an owl there. 



46 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

" Let 's go and see/' said the master, and we 
turned in that direction. Sure enough, we soon 
came face to face with a large hen-hawk perched 
in one of the trees, while the jays, one after 
another, were dashing as near him as they dared, 
yelling at him as they passed. 

At our nearer approach the hawk took wing ; 
then the jays disappeared, and silence fell upon 
the woods. And I dare say the schoolmaster 
gave me credit for being a wondrously wise man ! 

The jay has many notes, and once in a great 
while may even be heard indulging in something 
like a warble. One of his most musical calk 
sounds to my ears a little like the word " lily." 

He seems to be very fond of acorns, and is 
frequently to be seen standing upon a limb, 
holding an acorn under his claw and hammering 
it to pieces with all the force of his stout bill. 
When angered, he scolds violently, bobbing up 
and down in a most ridiculous manner. In fact, 
he is of a highly nervous temperament, and as 
full of gesticulations as a Frenchman. 

To me he is especially a bird of autumn. At 
that season the woods are loud with his clarion, 
and as I listen to it I can often feel myself a 
boy again, rambling in the woods that knew me 
in my school-days. With all his faults — his ill 
treatment of small birds, I mean — I should be 
sorry to have his numbers greatly diminished. 



XII 

THE KINGBIRD 

As a very small boy I spent much time in a 
certain piece of rather low ground partly grown 
up to bushes. Here in early spring I picked 
bunches of pretty pink and white flowers, which 
I now know to have been anemones. In the 
same place, a month or two later, I gathered 
splendid red lilies, and admired, without gather- 
ing it, a tiny blue flower with a yellow centre. 
This would not bear taking home, but was al- 
ways an attraction to me. I should have liked 
it better still, I am sure, if some one had been 
kind enough to tell me its pretty name — blue- 
eyed grass. 

Here, also, I picked the first strawberries of 
the season and the first blueberries. They were 
luxuries indeed. A " gill-cup " full of either of 
them was good pay for an hour's search. 

In one corner of the place there were half a 
dozen or so of apple-trees, and on the topmost 
branches of these there used to perch continually 
two or three birds of a kind which some older 



48 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

boy told me were kingbirds. At these my bro- 
ther and I — both of us small enough to be ex- 
cusable for such mischief — were in the habit of 
throwing green apples ; partly to see how near 
we could come to hitting them, partly for the 
fun of watching them rise into the air, circle 
about with sharp cries, and then settle back upon 
the perches they had left. Sometimes we stuck 
the half -grown apple on the end of a stick, swung 
the stick round our heads, and sent the apple 
flying to a tremendous distance. Stick or no 
stick, however, we were in no danger of killing 
anything, as I am glad now to remember. 

What amazed us was that the birds did not go 
away. No matter how long we " appled " them, 
they were certain to be on hand the next day in 
the same place. We must have been very young 
and very green, — greener even than the apples, 

— for it never occurred to us that the birds had 
nests in the trees, and for that reason were not 
to be driven away by our petty persecutions. 

Even then I noticed the peculiar flight of the 
birds — the short, quick strokes of their wings, 
and their habit of hovering. These are among 
the signs by which the kingbird can be recog- 
nized a long way off. He is dark-colored above, 

— almost black, — pure white underneath, and 
his tail, when outspread, shows a broad white 



THE KINGBIRD 49 

border at the tip. On his crown is an orange- 
red patch, but you will probably never see it 
unless you have the bird in your hand and brush 
apart the feathers in search of it. 

The kingbird's Latin name has much the same 
meaning as his common English one. Tyrannus 
tyrannies he is called by scientific people. He 
belongs to a family known as flycatchers, birds 
that catch insects on the wing. That is the rea- 
son why the kingbird likes a perch at the tip of 
something, so that he can dart out after a pass- 
ing insect, catch it, and return to his perch to 
wait for another. / should call him the " apple- 
tree flycatcher," if the matter were referred to 
me. 

He is not large, — little bigger than an Eng- 
lish sparrow, — but he has plenty of courage and 
a strong disposition to u rule the roost," as the 
saying goes. Every country boy has laughed to 
see the kingbird chasing a crow. And a very 
lively and pleasing sight it is : the crow making 
for the nearest wood as fast as his wings will 
carry him, and one or two kingbirds in hot pur- 
suit. Their great aim is to get above him and 
swoop down upon his back. Sometimes you will 
see one actually alight on a crow's back and, as 
boys say, " give it to him " in great style. 

Another taking action of the kingbird is his 



50 



EVERYDAY BIRDS 



trick of flying straight up in the air, almost per- 
pendicularly, as if he were trying to see how near 
he could come to performing that impossible feat, 
and then tumbling about madly, with noisy out- 
cries. Often it looks as if he actually turned 
somersaults. He cannot sing, and so has to let 
his high spirits bubble over in these half -crazy 
gymnastics. All in all, he is a very lively and 
entertaining customer. 

His nest is built in a tree, often in an orchard, 
and is comparatively easy to find. The birds 
arrive in New England in the first week of May, 
having passed the winter in Central or South 
America, and remain till the end of August. 

Like most birds, they are very punctual in 
their coming and going. No doubt they have 
an almanac of their own. You will do well to 
find one of them in Massachusetts after the first 
two or three days of September. 

Toward the end of their stay, flycatchers 
though they are, they feed largely upon berries. 
I have seen a dozen in one small dogwood bush, 
all eating greedily. 



XIII 

THE HUMMINGBIRD 

Hummingbirds are found only in America 
and on the islands near it. They are of many 
kinds, but only one kind is ever seen in the east- 
ern United States. This is known as the ruby- 
throated hummingbird, because of a splendid red 
throat-patch worn by the male. To speak more 
exactly, the patch is red only in some lights. 
You see it one instant as black as a coal, and the 
next instant it flashes like a coal on fire. This 
ornament, — a real jewel, — with the lovely 
shining green of the bird's back, makes him an 
object of great beauty. 

Every one knows him, or would do so only 
that some people confuse him with bright-colored, 
long-tongued hummingbird moths that are seen 
hovering, mostly in the early evening, over the 
flowers of the garden. 

The ruby-throat spends the winter south of 
the United States. He arrives in Florida in 
March, but does not reach New England till near 
the middle of May. 



52 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

Many persons seem to imagine that the hum- 
mer lives on the wing. They have never seen 
one sitting still, they say. But the truth is that 
hummingbirds pass but a small part of the time 
in the air. They are so very small, however, 
that they are easily overlooked on a branch of a 
tree, and the average person never notices them 
except when the hum of their wings attracts his 
attention. 

One of the prettiest sights in the world is a 
hummingbird hovering before a blossom, his 
wings vibrating so fast as to make a mist about 
him, and his long needle of a bill probing the 
flower with quick, eager thrusts. All his move- 
ments are of lightning-like rapidity, and even 
while your eyes are on him he is gone like a 
flash, you cannot say whither. 

The hummingbird's nest is built on a branch 
of a tree, — saddled on it, — and is not very 
hard to find after you have once seen one, and 
so have learned precisely what to look for. 
Generally it is placed well out toward the end of 
the limb. I have found it on pitch-pines in the 
woods, on roadside maples, — shade trees, — and 
especially in apple and pear orchards. The mo- 
ther bird is very apt to betray its whereabouts 
by buzzing about the head of any one who 
comes near it. 




RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD 

7, 2. Males. 3. Female. 4. Voting 



THE HUMMINGBIRD 53 

Last May, for example, I stopped in the mid- 
dle of the road to listen for the voice of a house 
wren, when I caught instead the buzz and squeak 
of a hummer. Turning my gaze upward, I saw 
her fly to a half -built nest on a maple branch 
directly over my head. 

The nest is a tiny thing, looking for size and 
shape like a cup out of a child's toy tea-set. Its 
walls are thick, and on the outside are covered 
— shingled, we may say — with bits of gray 
lichen, which help to make the nest look like 
nothing more than a knot. Whether they are 
put on for that purpose, or by way of ornament, 
is more than I can tell. 

The bird always lays two white eggs, about 
as large as peas. The young ones stay in the 
nest for three weeks, more or less, till they are 
fully grown and fledged, and perfectly well able 
to fly. I once saw one take his first flight, and 
a great venture it seemed. All these three 
weeks, and for another week afterward, the 
mother — no father is present — has her hands 
full to supply the little things with food, which 
she gives them from her crop, thrusting her 
long, sharp bill clean down their throats in the 
process, in a way to make a looker-on shiver. 
The only note I have ever heard from the ruby- 
throat is a squeak, which seems to be an expres- 



54 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

sion of nervousness or annoyance, and is uttered 
whenever an intruder — a man, a cat, or a 
strange bird — comes near the tree in which her 
treasures are hidden. 

Hummingbirds sometimes fly into open win- 
dows and are caught. At such times they be- 
come tame almost at once, but it is difficult, if 
not impossible, to keep them alive in captivity, 
and it is cruel to attempt it, except when the 
little creature is injured and plainly unable to 
look out for itself. 

A lady of my acquaintance discovered a hum- 
mingbird under her piazza. It had flown in by 
accident, probably, and now was darting to and 
fro in a frantic attempt to get out. The piazza 
was open on three sides, to be sure, but the 
frightened bird kept up against the ceiling, and 
of course found itself walled in. 

Fearful that it would injure itself, the lady 
brought a broom and tried to force it to come 
down and so discover its way out ; but it was 
only the more scared. Then a happy thought 
came to her. She went to the garden, plucked 
a few flowers, and going back to the piazza, set 
them down for the bird to see. Instantly it flew 
toward them, and as it did so it saw the open 
world without, and away it went. 

Another lady wrote me once a very pretty 



THE HUMMINGBIRD 55 

story of a hummer that came and probed a nas- 
turtium which she held in her hand. 

It is wonderful to think that so tiny a bird, 
born in New England or in Canada in June, 
should travel to Cuba or Central America in the 
autumn, and the next spring find its way back 
again to its birthplace. 



XIV 

THE CHIMNEY SWIFT 

Every kind of bird is adapted to get its living 
in a particular way. It is strong in some re- 
spects, and weak in others. Some birds have 
powerful legs, but can hardly fly ; others live on 
the wing, and can hardly walk. Of these flying 
birds none is more common than the chimney 
swift, or, as he is improperly called, the chimney 
swallow. No one ever saw him sitting on a 
perch or walking on the ground. In fact, his 
wings are so long, and his legs so short and weak, 
that if he were to alight on the ground, he would 
probably never be able to rise into the air 
again. 

He hardly seems to need a description, and 
yet I suppose that many persons, not to say 
people in general, do not know him from a swal- 
low. His color is sooty brown, turning to gray 
on the throat. His body, as he is seen in the 
air, is shaped like a bobbin, bluntly pointed at 
both ends. If he is carefully watched, however, 



THE CHIMNEY SWIFT 57 

it will be noticed that he spreads his tail for an 
instant whenever he changes suddenly the direc- 
tion of his flight. In other words, he uses his 
tail as a rudder. 

He shoots about the sky at a tremendous 
speed, much of the time sailing, with his long, nar- 
row wings firmly set, and is especially lively and 
noisy toward nightfall. Very commonly two or 
three of the birds fly side by side, cackling 
merrily and acting very much as if they were 
amusing themselves with some kind of game. 

They feed on the wing, and have wide, gaping 
mouths perfectly adapted to that purpose. 

As their name implies, they build their nests 
and pass the night mostly in chimneys, although 
in the wilder parts of the country they still 
inhabit hollow trees. Numbers of pairs live 
together in a colony. 

One of the chimneys of a certain house near 
the Charles River, in Newton, Massachusetts, has 
for many years been a favorite resort of swifts. 
I have many times visited the place to watch the 
birds go to roost. Little by little they gather in 
a flock, as twilight comes on, and then for an 
hour or more the whole company, hundreds in 
number, go sweeping over the valley in broad 
circles, having the chimney for a centre. Grad- 
ually the circles become narrower, and at the 



58 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

same time the excitement of the flock increases. 
Again and again the birds approach the chim- 
ney, as if they meant to descend into it. Then 
away they shoot for another round. 

At length the going to roost actually begins. 
Half a dozen or a dozen of the birds drop one 
by one into the chimney. The rest sweep away, 
and when they come back, a second detachment 
drops in. And so the lively performance goes 
on till the last straggler folds his wings above 
the big black cavity and tumbles headlong out 
of sight. 

The swift makes his nest of twigs, and as he 
cannot alight on the ground in search of them, 
he is compelled to gather them from the dead 
limbs of trees. Over and over again you will 
see the bird dart against such a limb, catching 
at a twig as he pauses for the merest instant be- 
fore it. It is difficult to be sure whether he suc- 
ceeds or not, his movements are so rapid, but it 
is certain that he must often fail. However, he 
acts upon the old motto, " Try, try again/' and 
in course of time the nest is built. And an 
extremely pretty nest it is, with the white eggs 
in it, the black twigs glued firmly together with 
the bird's own saliva. 



XV 

NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 

Rustic people are a little shy of theories and 
" book-learning." Not long ago — it was early 
in March — I met an old man who lives by him- 
self in a kind of hermitage in the woods, and 
who knows me in a general way as a bird stu- 
dent. We greeted each other, and I inquired 
whether he had seen any bluebirds yet. Np, he 
said, it was n't time. 

" Oh, but they are here," I answered. " I saw 
a flock of ten on the 26th of February." Good- 
natured incredulity came out all over his face. 

" Did you hear them sing ? " he asked. 

" Yes," said I ; " and, furthermore, I saw 
some this forenoon very near your house." 

" Well," he remarked, " according to my ex- 
perience, it is too early for bluebirds. Besides, 
they never go in flocks ; and when anybody tells 
me at this time of the year that he has seen a 
flock of bluebirds, I always know that he has seen 
some blue snowbirds." 



60 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

He spoke with an air of finality which left me 
nothing to do but to smile and pass on. 

This little incident called to mind another, and 
that put it into my head to write this article. 

A farmer, who had seen me passing his house 
and loitering about his lanes and fields for sev- 
eral years, often with an opera-glass in my hand, 
one day hailed me to ask whether the nighthawk 
and the whip-poor-will were the same bird, as he 
had heard people say. I assured him (or rather 
I told him — it turned out that I had not made 
him sure) that they were quite distinct, and pro- 
ceeded to remark upon some of the more obvious 
points of difference between the two, especially 
as to their habits and manner of life. He lis- 
tened with all deference to what I had to offer, 
but as I concluded and turned to leave him, he 
said : " Well, some folks say they 're the same. 
They say one 's the he one and t' other 's the she 
one ; but I guess they ain't." 

Verily, thought I, popular science lectures are 
sometimes a failure. Not long afterward I was 
telling the story to a Massachusetts man, a man who 
had made a collection of birds' eggs in his time. 

" Why," said he, " are n't they the same ? I 
always understood that they were the male and 
female of the same species. That was the com- 
mon belief where I was brought up." 









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NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 61 

The confusion of the two birds is widespread , 
in spite of Audubon's testimony that he had sel- 
dom seen a farmer or even a boy in the United 
States who did not know the difference between 
them. But, while they resemble each other 
closely, they are sufficiently unlike to be classi- 
fied not only as separate species, but as species 
of different genera. As for the difference in 
their habits, it is such as any one may see and 
appreciate. The nighthawk, for all its name, is 
not a night bird. It is most active at twilight, 
— in other words, it is crepuscular instead of 
nocturnal, — but is often to be seen flying abroad 
at midday. The whip-poor-will, on the contrary, 
is quiet till after dark. Then it starts into full- 
ness of life, singing with the utmost enthusiasm, 
till the listener wonders where it can find breath 
for such rapid and long-continued efforts. The 
nighthawk is not a musician. While flying it 
frequently utters a single note, of a guttural- 
nasal quality, almost indistinguishable from the 
so-called bleat of the woodcock ; but, in place of 
singing, it indulges in a fine aerial tumbling per- 
formance, much in the manner of the snipe. 
This performance I have many times observed 
in early summer from the Public Garden in Bos- 
ton. I have seen it also in September, though 
it is doubtless much less common at that season. 



62 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

The bird rises gradually to a considerable height, 
and presently drops like a stone almost to the 
ground. At the last moment it arrests itself sud- 
denly, and then is heard a very peculiar " boom- 
ing " noise, whether produced by the wings or 
by the voice, I will not presume to say. 

The most attractive feature of the nighthawk, 
to my eye, is its beautiful and peculiar flight — 
a marvel of ease and grace, and sufficient to dis- 
tinguish it at a glance from every other New 
England bird. It is a creature of the upper air, 
never skimming the ground, so far as I know, 
and as it passes overhead you may easily see the 
large white patch in the middle of each long 
wing — - a beauty spot, by the way, which is 
common to both sexes, and is wanting in the 
whip-poor-will. 

The whip-poor-will's chief distinction is its 
song — a song by itself, and familiar to every 
one. Some people call it mournful, and I fear 
there are still a few superstitious souls who listen 
to it with a kind of trembling. I have heard of 
the bird's being shot because the inhabitants of a 
house could not bear its doleful and boding cry, 
as they were pleased to consider it. To my ears 
it is sweet music. I take many an evening stroll 
on purpose to enjoy it, and am perennially thank- 
ful to Audubon for saying that he found the 





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NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 63 

whip-poor-will's " cheering voice " more interest- 
ing than the song of the nightingale. 

It will surprise unscientific readers to be told 
that the nearest relatives o£ whip-poor-wills and 
nighthawks are the swifts and the humming- 
birds. As if a chimney swift were more like a 
whip-poor-will than like a swallow ! and, still 
more absurd, as if there were any close relation- 
ship between whip-poor-wills and hummingbirds ! 
Put a whip-poor-will and a ruby-throated hum- 
mer side by side and they certainly do look very 
little alike — the big whip-poor-will, with its 
mottled plumage and its short, gaping beak, and 
the tiny hummingbird with its burnished feathers 
and its long needle of a bill. Evidently there 
is no great reliance to be placed upon outside 
show, or what scientific men call " external 
characters." We might as well say that the 
strawberry vine and the apple-tree were own 
cousins. Yes, so we might, for the apple-tree 
and the strawberry vine are cousins — at least 
they are members of the same great and noble 
family, the family of the roses ! We shall never 
get far, in science or in anything else, until we 
learn to look below the surface. 



XVI 

THE FLICKER 

The flicker is the largest of our common 
American woodpeckers, being somewhat longer 
and stouter than the robin. It is known, by 
sight at least, to almost every one who notices 
birds at all, and perhaps for this reaspn it has 
received an unusual number of popular names. 
" Golden- winged woodpecker," which is proba- 
bly the best known of these, comes from the fact 
that the bird's wings are yellow on the under 
side. " Harry Wicket," " Highhole," — because 
its nest is sometimes pretty far above the ground, 
— " Yellowhammer," and-" Pigeon-woodpecker " 
are also among its more familiar nicknames. 

Unlike other birds of its family, the flicker 
passes much of its time on the ground, where 
it hops awkwardly about, feeding upon insects, 
especially upon ants. As you come near it, 
while it is thus engaged, it rises with a peculiar 
purring sound, and as it flies from you it shows 
a broad white patch on its rump — the lower 




FLICKER 

/. Male. 2. Feu/ales 



THE FLICKER 65 

back, above the root of the tail. Every one who 
has ever walked much over grassy fields must 
have seen the bird and been struck by this con- 
spicuous light mark. He must have noticed, 
too, the bird's peculiar up-and-down, u jumping " 
manner of flight, by which it goes swooping 
across the country in long undulations or 
waves. 

The flicker's general color is brown, with spot- 
tings and streakings of black, and more or less 
of violet or lilac shading. On the back of its 
neck it wears a band of bright scarlet, and across 
its breast is a conspicuous black crescent. 

It is fond of old apple orchards, and often 
makes its nest in a decaying trunk. In some 
places, near the seashore, especially, — where it 
is commoner than elsewhere in winter, and where 
large trees are scarce, — it makes enemies by its 
habit of drilling holes in barns and even in 
churches. I remember a meeting-house on Cape 
Cod which had a good number of such holes in 
its front wall — or rather it had the scars of 
such holes, for they had been covered with 
patches of tin. That was a case where going to 
church might be called a bad habit. 

In fall and winter, if not at other seasons, the 
flicker feeds largely upon berries. In years 
when the poison ivy bears a good crop, I am 



66 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

pretty sure to find two or three flickers all winter 
long about a certain farrn, the stone walls of 
which are overrun with this handsome but un- 
wholesome vine, although it is hard to imagine 
that the dry, stony fruit should yield much in 
the way of nourishment, even to a woodpecker. 

As spring comes on, the flicker becomes 
numerous and very noisy. His best known vocal 
effort is a prolonged hi-hi-hi, very loud and ring- 
ing, and kept up until the listener wonders where 
the author of it gets his wind. This, I think, is 
the bird's substitute for a song. He has at all 
times a loud, unmusical yawp, — a signal, I sup- 
pose, — and in the mating season especially he 
utters a very affectionate, conversational wicker 
or flicker. Every country boy should be familiar 
with these three notes. 

But besides being a vocalist, — we can hardly 
call him a singer, — the flicker is a player upon 
instruments. He is a great drummer ; and if 
any one imagines that woodpeckers do not enjoy 
the sound of their own music, he should watch 
a flicker drumming with his long bill on a bat- 
tered tin pan in the middle of a pasture. Morn- 
ing after morning I have seen one thus engaged, 
drumming lustily, and then cocking his head to 
listen for an answer; and Paderewski at his 
daily practice upon the piano could not have 



THE FLICKER 67 

looked more in earnest. At other times the 
flicker contents himself with a piece of resonant 
loose bark or a dry limb. 

One proof that this drumming — which is 
indulged in by woodpeckers generally — is a 
true musical performance, and not a mere drill- 
ing for grubs, is the fact that we never hear it 
in winter. It begins as the weather grows mild, 
and is as much a sign of spring as the peeping 
of the little tree-frogs — hylas — in the meadow. 

The flicker's nest, as I have said, is built in a 
hole in a tree, often an apple-tree. Very noisy 
in his natural disposition, he keeps a wise silence 
while near the spot where his mate is sitting, and 
will rear a brood under the orchard-owner's nose 
without betraying himself. The young birds 
are fed from the parent's crop, as young pigeons 
and young hummingbirds are. The old bird 
thrusts its bill down the throat of the nestling 
and gives it a meal of partially digested food by 
what scientific people call a process of regurgita- 
tion. Farmers' boys, who have watched pigeons 
feeding their squabs, will know precisely what is 
meant. 



xvn 

THE BITTERN 

It was a great day for me when I first heard 
the so-called booming of the bittern. For more 
than ten years I had devoted the principal part 
of my spare hours to the study of birds, but 
though I had taken many an evening walk near 
the most promising meadows in my neighbor- 
hood, I could never hear those mysterious pump- 
ing or stake-driving noises of which I had read 
with so much interest, especially in the writings 
of Thoreau. 

The truth was, as I have since assured myself, 
that this representative of the heron family was 
not a resident within the limits of my everyday 
rambles, none of the meadows thereabout being 
extensive and secluded enough to suit his whim. 

There came a day, however, when with a 
friend I made an afternoon excursion to Way- 
land, Massachusetts, on purpose to form the 
stake-driver's acquaintance. We walked up the 
railway track across the river toward Sudbury, 



THE BITTEEN 69 

and were hardly seated on the edge of the 
meadow, facing the beautiful Nobscot Hill, be- 
fore my comrade said, " Hark ! There he is ! " 

Yes, that certainly was the very sound — an 
old-fashioned wooden pump at work in the 
meadow. 

We listened intently for perhaps half a dozen 
times ; then I proposed going further up the 
track to get the notes at shorter range, and pos- 
sibly — who could tell what unheard-of thing 
might happen ? — to obtain a sight of the bird. 
We advanced cautiously, though as we were on 
the track, six feet or more above the level of the 
meadow, there was no chance of concealment, 
and the bittern went on with his performance. 

Meanwhile we maintained a sharp lookout, and 
presently I descried a narrow brown object stand- 
ing upright amidst the grass — a stick, perhaps. 
I lifted my opera-glass and spoke quickly to my 
friend : " I see him ! " 

" Where ? " he asked ; and when I lowered 
my glass and gave him the bird's bearings as 
related to the remains of an old hayrick not far 
off, he said, " Why, I saw that, but took it for a 
stick." 

" Yes, but see the eye," I answered. 

Within half a minute the bird suddenly threw 
his head forward and commenced pumping. 



70 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

This was good luck indeed, — that I should 
surprise my very first bittern in his famous act, 
a thing which better men than I, after years of 
familiarity with the bird, had never once suc- 
ceeded in accomplishing. Who says that For- 
tune does not sometimes favor the fresh hand ? 

The fellow repeated the operation three times, 
and between whiles moved stealthily through 
the grass toward the leavings of the haycock 
before mentioned. 

When he reached the hay, we held our breath. 
Would he actually mount it ? Yes, that was 
undoubtedly his intention ; but he meant to do 
it in such a way that no mortal eye should see 
him. All the time glancing furtively to left and 
right, as if the grass were full of enemies, he put 
one foot before the other with almost inconceiv- 
able slowness, — as the hour hand turns on the 
clock's face. It was an admirable display of an 
art which this race of frog, mouse, and insect 
catchers has cultivated for untold generations — 
an art on which its livelihood depends, the art 
of invisible motion. 

There was no resisting the ludicrousness of 
his manner. He was in full view, but so long 
as he kept still he seemed to think himself quite 
safe from detection. Like the hand of the clock, 
however, if he was slow he was sure, and in time 



THE BITTERN 71 

he was fairly out of the grass, standing in plain 
sight upon his hay platform. 

Once in position he fell to pumping in earnest, 
and kept it up for more than an hour, while two 
enthusiasts sat upon the railway embankment, 
twelve or thirteen rods distant^ with opera-glasses 
and note-books, scrutinizing his every motion, 
and felicitating themselves again and again on 
seeing thus plainly what so few had ever seen at 
all. What would Thoreau have given for such 
an opportunity ? 

" The stake-driver is at it in his favorite 
meadow," he writes in his journal, in 1852. " I 
followed the sound, and at last got within two 
rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing 
you, like a will-o'-the-wisp, farther away into the 
meadows. When thus near, I heard some lower 
sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump 
or a stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed 
the gurgling, pumping notes fit to come from a 
meadow. 

" This was just within the blueberry and other 
bushes, and when the bird flew up, alarmed, I 
went to the place, but could see no water, which 
makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in 
making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so 
deep as to reach water where it is dry on the 
surface." 



72 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

This notion that water is employed in the pro- 
duction of the bittern's notes has been generally 
entertained. The notes themselves are of a char- 
acter to suggest such an hypothesis, and at least 
one witness has borne circumstantial testimony 
to its truth. In Thoreau's essay on the " Natu- 
ral History of Massachusetts/' he says : — 

" On one occasion, the bird has been seen by 
one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the 
water, and suck up as much as it could hold ; 
then, raising its head, it pumped it out again 
with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it 
two or three feet, and making the sound each 
time." 

Similar statements have been made as to the 
corresponding notes of the European bittern. 
None of our systematic writers upon American 
ornithology have ever witnessed the performance, 
as far as appears, and being too honest to draw 
upon their imaginations, they have left the matter 
a mystery. Now, on this auspicious May after- 
noon, if we learned nothing else, we could at all 
events make quite sure whether or not the bittern 
did really spout water from his beak. 

My readers will have guessed already that our 
bird, at least, did nothing of the sort. His bill 
was never within reach of water. The operation 
is a queer one, hard to describe. 



THE BITTERN 73 

The bittern has been standing motionless, per- 
haps in the humpbacked attitude in which the 
artists, following Audubon's plate, have com- 
monly represented him ; or quite as likely, he 
has been making a stick or a soldier of himself, 
standing bolt upright at full stretch, his long 
neck and bill pointed straight at the zenith. 

Suddenly he lowers his head, and instantly 
raises it again and throws it forward with a 
quick, convulsive jerk. This movement is at- 
tended by an opening and shutting of the bill, 
which in turn is accompanied by a sound which 
has been well compared to a violent hiccough. 
The hiccough — with which, I think, the click of 
the big mandibles may sometimes be heard — is 
repeated a few times, each time a little louder 
than before ; and then succeed the real pumping 
or stake-driving noises. 

These are in sets of three syllables each, of 
which the first syllable is the longest, and some- 
what separated from the others. The accent is 
strongly upon the middle syllable, and the whole, 
as of tenest heard, is an exact reproduction of the 
sound of a wooden pump, as I have already said, 
the voice having that peculiar hollow quality 
which is produced, not by the flow of the water, 
but by the suction of the air in the tube when 
the pump begins to work. 



74 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

But the looker-on is likely to be quite as much 
impressed by what he sees as by what he hears. 
During the whole performance, but especially 
during the latter part of it, the bird is engaged 
in the most violent contortions, suggestive of 
nothing but a patient suffering from uncontrol- 
lable nausea. Moreover, as soon as the prelimi- 
nary hiccoughs begin, the lower throat or breast 
is seen to be swelling ; the dilatation grows 
larger and larger till the pumping is well under 
way, and so far as my companion and I could 
detect, does not subside in the least until the 
noises have ceased altogether. 

How are the unique, outlandish notes pro- 
duced ? I cannot profess to know. Our opinion 
was that the bird swallowed air into his gullet, 
gulping it down with each snap of the beak. To 
all appearance it was necessary for him to inflate 
the crop in this way before he could pump, or 
boom. As to how much of the grand booming 
was connected with the swallowing of the air, 
and how much, if any, with the expulsion of it, 
my friend and I did not agree, and of course 
neither of us could do more than guess. 

I made some experiments afterwards, by way 
of imitating the noises ; and these experiments, 
together with the fact that the grand booming 
seemed to be really nothing more than a develop- 



THE BITTERN 75 

ment o£ the preliminary hiccoughs, and the fur- 
ther fact that the swelling of the breast did not 
go down gradually during the course of the per- 
formance, but suddenly at the close, — all these 
incline me to believe that the notes are mainly if 
not entirely caused by the inhalation or swallow- 
ing of the air ; and I am somewhat strengthened 
in this opinion by perceiving that when a man 
takes air into his stomach the act is attended by 
a sound not altogether unlike the bittern's note 
in quality, while the expulsion of it gives rise to 
noises of an entirely dissimilar character. 

That the sounds in question were not made 
entirely by any ordinary action of the vocal or- 
gans was the decided opinion of both my friend 
and myself. 

As I have said, we watched the performance 
for more than an hour. We were sitting squarely 
upon the track, and once were compelled to get 
up to let a train pass ; but the bittern evidently 
paid no attention to matters on the railway, being 
well used to thunder in that direction, and stood 
his ground without wincing. 

When he had pumped long enough, — and the 
operation surely looked like pretty hard work, — 
he suddenly took wing and flew a little distance 
down the meadow. The moment he dropped into 
the grass he pumped, and on making another 



76 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

flight he again pumped immediately upon coming 
to the ground. This trick, which surprised me 
not a little in view of the severe exertion required, 
is perhaps akin to the habit of smaller birds, who 
in seasons of excitement will very often break 
into song at the moment of striking a perch. 

As we came down the track on our way back 
to the station, three bitterns were in the air at 
once, while a fourth was booming on the opposite 
side of the road. One of the flying birds per- 
sistently dangled his legs instead of drawing 
them up in the usual fashion and letting the feet 
stick out behind, parallel with the tail. Probably 
he was " showing off," as is the custom of many 
birds during the season of mating. 

Our bird across the road, by the bye, was not 
pumping, but driving a stake. The middle sylla- 
ble was truly a mighty whack with a mallet on 
the head of a post, so that I could easily enough 
credit Mr. Samuels's statement that he once fol- 
lowed the sound for half a mile, expecting to 
find a farmer setting a fence. 

In the midst of the hurly-burly we saw a boy 
coming toward us on the track. 

" Let 's ask him about it," said my companion. 

So, with an air of inquisitive ignorance, he 
stopped the fellow, and inquired, " Do you know 
what it is we hear making that curious noise off 
there in the meadow ? " 



THE BITTERN 77 

The boy evidently took us for a pair of igno- 
ramuses from the city. 

" I guess it 's a frog/' he answered. But when 
the sounds were repeated he shook his head and 
confessed honestly that he didn't know what 
made them. 

It was too bad, I thought, that he did not 
stick to his frog theory. It would have made so 
much better a story! He appeared to feel no 
curiosity about the matter, and we allowed him 
to pass on unenlightened. 

Not all Wayland people are thus poorly in- 
formed, however, and we shortly learned, to our 
considerable satisfaction, that they have a most 
felicitous local name for the bird. They call 
him " plum-pudd'n'," which is exactly what he 
himself says, only that his u is in both words 
somewhat long, like the vowel in "full." To 
get the true effect of the words they should be 
spoken with the lips nearly closed, and in a deep 
voice. 

A few days after this excursion I found a bit- 
tern in a large wet meadow somewhat nearer 
home. At the nearest he was a long way off, 
and as I went farther and farther away from 
him, I remarked the very unexpected fact that 
the last syllable to be lost was not the second, 
which bears so sharp an accent, but the long 



78 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

first syllable. It seemed contrary to reason, but 
such was unquestionably the truth, and later 
experiments confirmed it, 

This was in the spring of 1888. In May of 
the next year, if all went well, we would see the 
show again. So we said to each other ; but a 
veteran ornithologist remarked that we should 
probably be a good many years older before we 
had another such piece of good fortune. 

It is a fact familiar to all naturalists, however, 
that when you have once found a new plant, or 
a new bird, or a new nest, the experience is 
likely to be soon repeated. You may have sp^nt 
a dozen years in a vain search, but now, for 
some reason, the difficult has all at once become 
easy, and almost before you can believe your 
eyes the rarity has grown to be a drug in the 
market. Something like this proved to be true 
of the bittern's boom. 

On the afternoon of the 2d of May, 1889, I 
went to one of my favorite resorts, a large cat- 
tail swamp surrounded by woods. My particu- 
lar errand was to see whether the least bittern 
had arrived, — a much smaller, and in this part 
of the country, at least, a much less common 
bird than his relative of whose vocal accomplish- 
ments I am here treating. 

I threw myself down upon the cliff overhang- 



THE BITTERN 79 

ing the edge of the swamp, to listen for the 
desired coo-coo-coo~coo, and had barely made my- 
self comfortable when I heard the plum-pudd V 
of the bittern himself, proceeding, as it seemed, 
from the reeds directly at my feet. Further lis- 
tening satisfied me that the fellow was not far 
from the end of a rocky peninsula which juts 
into the swamp just at this point. 

I slipped down the cliff as quietly as possible, 
picked my way across the narrow neck leading to 
the main peninsula, and by keeping behind rocks 
and trees managed to reach the very tip without 
disturbing the bird. Here I posted myself among 
the thick trees, and awaited a repetition of the 
boom. It was not long in coming, and plainly 
proceeded from a bunch of flags just across a 
little stretch of clear water. ' 

I looked and looked, while the bittern con- 
tinued to pump at rather protracted intervals ; 
but I could see nothing whatever, till presto ! 
there the creature stood in plain sight. 

Whether he had moved into view, or had all 
the time been visible, I cannot tell. He soon 
pumped again, and then again, for perhaps six 
times. Then he stalked away out of sight, and 
I heard nothing more. He was much nearer 
than last year's bird had been, but was still a 
pumper, not a stake-driver, and his action was in 
all respects the same as I had before witnessed. 



80 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

There had been no bittern in this swamp the 
season previous, nor did any breed here this 
summer. I visited the place too often for him 
to have escaped my notice, had he been present. 
This bird, then, was a migrant, and his booming 
was of interest as showing that the bittern, like 
the song-birds, does not wait to get into summer 
quarters before beginning to rehearse his love 
music. 

Two days after this my companion of the year 
before went with me again to Wayland, and, not 
to prolong a long story, we sat again upon the 
railway and watched a bittern pump for more 
than an hour. This time, to be sure, he was 
partially concealed by the grass, besides being 
farther away than we could have wished. 

It was curious, and illustrated strikingly the 
utility of the bird's habit of standing motionless, 
that my friend, who is certainly as sharp-eyed an 
observer as I have ever known, was once more 
completely taken in. As luck would have it, I 
caught sight of the bird first, and when I pointed 
him out to the other man he replied, " Why, of 
course I saw that, but it never occurred to me 
but that it was a stake." 

We returned from this excursion fairly well 
convinced that in the early part of the season, 
while the grass is still short, one may hope to 



THE BITTERN 81 

see a bittern pump almost any day, if he will go 
to a suitable meadow which has a railroad run- 
ning through it. The track answers a double 
purpose : it gives the observer an outlook, such 
as cannot be obtained from a boat, and further- 
more, the birds are quite unsuspicious of things 
on the track, while the presence of a man in the 
grass or on the river would almost inevitably 
attract their attention. 






xvm 

BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 

Some birds belong exclusively to specialists. 
They are so rare, or their manner of life is so 
seclusive, that people in general can never be 
expected to know them except from books. The 
latest list of the birds of Massachusetts includes 
about three hundred and fifty species and sub- 
species. Of these, seventy-five or more are so 
foreign to this part of the country as to have ap- 
peared here only by accident, while many others 
are so excessively rare that no individual observer 
can count upon seeing them, however close a 
lookout he may keep. Other species are present 
in goodly numbers, but only in certain portions 
of the State ; and still others, though generally 
distributed and fairly numerous, live habitually 
in almost impenetrable swamps or in deep forests, 
and of necessity are seen only by those who make 
it their business to look for them. 

It is something for which busy men and women 
may well be thankful, therefore, that so many of 



BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 83 

the most pleasing, or otherwise interesting, of all 
our birds are among those which may be called 
birds for everybody. Such are the robin, the 
bluebird, the Baltimore oriole, — or golden robin, 
— the blue jay, the crow, and the chickadee. Of 
all these we may say that they are common ; they 
come in every one's way, and, what is still more 
to the point, they cannot be mistaken [for any- 
thing else. Others are equally common, and are 
easily enough seen, but their identity is not so 
much a matter of course. 

The song sparrow, for example, is abundant in 
Massachusetts from the middle of March to the 
end of October. Outside of the forest it is almost 
ubiquitous ; it sings beautifully and with the 
utmost freedom ; it ought, one would say, to be 
universally known. But it is a sparrow, not the 
sparrow. In other words, it is only one of many, 
and so, common as it is, and freely as it sings (it 
is to be heard in every garden and by every road- 
side in the latter half of March, when few other 
birds are in tune), it passes unrecognized by the 
generality of people. They read in books of song 
sparrows, chipping sparrows, field sparrows, tree 
sparrows, swamp sparrows, vesper sparrows, white- 
throated sparrows, fox sparrows, yellow-winged 
sparrows, savanna sparrows, and the like, and 
when they see any little mottled brown bird, 



84 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

they say, " Oh, it 's a sparrow/' and seek to know 
nothing more. 

The family of warblers — among the loveliest 
of all birds — are in a still worse case, and much 
the same may be said of swallows and blackbirds, 
thrushes and vireos. The number of species and 
their perplexing similarity, which are such an at- 
traction to the student, prove an effectual bar to 
those who have time and money for newspapers 
and novels, but can spare neither for a manual 
of local ornithology. 

I have named six birds which every one knows, 
or may know, but of course I do not mean that 
these are all. Why should not everybody know 
the goldfinch — a small, stout-billed, bright yel- 
low, canary-like bird, with black wings and tail 
and a black cap ? And the flicker — or golden- 
winged woodpecker — a little larger than the 
robin, with gold-lined wings, a black crescent on 
the breast, a red patch on the back of the head, 
and a white rump, conspicuous as the bird takes 
wing ? The hummingbird, too — our only one ; 
I should say that everybody ought to recognize 
it, only that I have found some who confuse 
it with sphinx moths, and will hardly believe 
me when I tell them of their mistake. The 
cedar-bird, likewise, known also as the cherry- 
bird and the waxwing, is a bird by itself ; re- 



BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 85 

markably trim and sleek, its upper parts of a 
peculiarly warm cinnamon brown, its lower parts 
yellowish, its tail tipped handsomely with yellow, 
its head marked with black and adorned with a 
truly magnificent top-knot ; as great a lover o£ 
cherries as any schoolboy, and one of the first 
birds upon which the youthful taxidermist tries 
his hand. Just now — in early March — the 
waxwings are hereabout in great flocks (I saw 
more than a hundred, surely, three days ago), 
stuffing themselves, literally, with savin berries. 
These large flocks will after a while disappear, 
and some time later, in May, smaller companies 
will arrive from the South and settle with us for 
the summer, helping themselves to our cherries 
in return for the swarms of insects of whose pre- 
sence they have relieved us. If we see them thus 
engaged, we shall do well to remember the Scrip- 
ture text, " The laborer is worthy of his hire." 

This enumeration of birds, so strongly marked 
that even a wayfaring man may easily name them, 
might be extended indefinitely. It would be a 
strange Massachusetts boy who did not know the 
ruffed grouse (though he would probably call 
him the partridge) and the Bob White ; the king- 
bird, with his black and white plumage, his aerial 
tumblings, and his dashing pursuit of the crow ; 
the splendid scarlet tanager, fiery red, with black 



86 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

tail and wings; the bobolink; the red-winged 
blackbird, whose watery co?ikaree is so welcome 
a sound about the meadows in March ; the slate- 
colored snowbird ; the indigo-bird, small, deep blue 
throughout, and with a thick bill ; the butcher- 
bird, a constant though not numerous winter vis- 
itor, sometimes flying against windows in which 
canaries are hung, as one did at our house only 
this winter — these surely may be known by any 
who will take even slight pains to form their 
acquaintance. And, beside these, there are two 
birds whom everybody does know, but whom I 
forgot to include with the six first mentioned, — 
the catbird and the brown thrasher, two over- 
grown, long-tailed wrens, near relatives of the 
mockingbird, both of them great singers in their 
way, and one of them — the catbird — decidedly 
familiar and a fairly good mimic. 



XIX 

WINTER PENSIONERS 

Our northern winter is a lean time, ornitho- 
logically, though it brings us some choice birds 
of its own, and is not without many alleviations. 
When the redpolls come in crowds and the white- 
winged crossbills in good numbers, both of which 
things happened last year, the world is not half 
so bad with us as it might be. Still, winter is 
winter, a season to be tided over rather than 
doted upon, and anything which helps to make 
the time pass agreeably is matter for thankful- 
ness. So I am asked to write something about 
the habit we are in at our house of feeding birds 
in cold weather, and thus keeping them under 
the windows. Really we have done nothing 
peculiar, nor has our success been beyond that of 
many of our neighbors ; but such as it is, the 
work has given us much enjoyment, and the 
readers of " Bird-Lore" are welcome to the story. 

Our method is to put out pieces of raw suet, 
mostly the trimmings of beefsteak. These we 



88 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

attach to branches of trees and to the veranda 
trellis, taking pains, of course, to have them 
beyond the cat's reach (that the birds may feed 
safely), and at the same time well disposed for 
our own convenience as spectators. For myself, 
in addition, I generally nail pieces of the bait 
upon one or two of the outer sills of my study 
windows. I like, as I sit reading or writing, to 
hear now and then a nuthatch or a chickadee 
hammering just outside the pane. Often I rise 
to have a look at the visitor. There is nothing 
but the glass between us, and I can stand near 
enough to see his beady eyes, and, sq to speak, 
the expression of his face. Sometimes two birds 
are there at once, one waiting for the other. 
Sometimes they have a bit of a set-to. Then, 
certainly, they are not without facial expression. 
Once in a while, in severe weather, I have 
sprinkled crumbs (sweet or fatty crumbs are best 
— say bits of doughnut) on the inside ledge, and 
then, with the window raised a few inches, have 
awaited callers. If the weather is bad enough 
they are not long in coming. A chickadee 
alights on the outer sill, notices the open win- 
dow, scolds a little (the thing looks like a trap — 
at all events it is something new, and birds are 
conservative), catches sight of the crumbs (well, 
now, that 's another story), ceases his dee, dee, 
dee, and the next minute hops inside. 




A DOWNY WOODPECKER 




A BRANCH ESTABLISHMENT 



WINTER PENSIONERS 89 

The crumbs prove to be appetizing, and by 
the time he has swallowed a few of them he 
seems to forget how he came in, and instead of 
backing out, as a reasonable being like a chick- 
adee might be expected to do, he flies to another 
light of the bay window. Then, lest he should 
injure himself, I must get up and catch him and 
show him to the door. By the time I have done 
this two or three times within half an hour, I 
begin to find it an interruption to other work, 
and put down the window. White-breasted nut- 
hatches and downies come often to the outer sill, 
but only the chickadees ever venture inside. 

These three are our daily pensioners. If they 
are all in the tree together, as they very often 
are, they take precedence at the larder according 
to their size. No nuthatch presumes to hurry 
a woodpecker, and no chickadee ever thinks of 
disturbing a nuthatch. He may fret audibly, 
calling the other fellow greedy, for aught I know, 
and asking him if he wants the earth ; but he 
maintains a respectful distance. Birds, like wild 
things in general, have a natural reverence for 
size and weight. 

The chickadees are much the most numerous 
with us, but taking the year together, the wood- 
peckers are the most constant. My notes record 
them as present in the middle of October, 1899, 



90 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

and now, in the middle of October, 1900, they 
are still in daily attendance. Perhaps there were 
a few weeks of midsummer when they stayed 
away, but I think not. One pair built a nest 
somewhere in the neighborhood and depended 
on us largely for supplies, much to their con- 
venience and our pleasure. As soon as the red- 
capped young ones were able to fly, the parents 
brought them to the tree and fed them with the 
suet (it was a wonder how much of it they could 
eat), till they were old enough to help them- 
selves. And they act, old and young alike, as if 
they owned the place. If a grocer's wagon hap- 
pens to stop under the tree they wax indignant, 
and remain so till it drives away. Even the 
black cat, Satan, has come to acknowledge their 
rights in the case, and no longer so much as 
thinks of them as possible game. 

I have spoken, I see, as if these three species 
were all ; but, not to mention the blue jays, 
whose continual visits are rather ineffectively 
frowned upon (they carry off too much at once), 
we had last winter, for all the latter half of it, a 
pair of red-bellied nuthatches. They dined with 
us daily (pretty creatures they are), and stayed so 
late in the spring that I began to hope the handy 
food-supply would induce them to tarry for the 
summer. They were mates, I think. At any 



WINTER PENSIONERS 91 

rate, they preferred to eat from the same bit of 
fat, one on each side, in great contrast with all 
the rest of our company. Frequently, too, a 
brown creeper would be seen hitching up the 
trunk or over the larger limbs. He likes plea- 
sant society, though he has little to say, and 
perhaps found scraps of suet in the crevices of 
the bark, where the chickadees, who are given 
to this kind of providence, may have packed it 
in store. Somewhat less frequently a goldcrest 
would come with the others, fluttering amid the 
branches like a sprite. One bird draws another, 
especially in hard times. And so it happened 
that our tree, or rather trees, — an elm and a 
maple, — were something like an aviary the 
whole winter through. It was worth moye than 
all the trouble which the experiment cost us to 
lie in bed before sunrise, with the mercury below 
zero, and hear a chickadee just outside singing 
as sweetly as any thrush could sing in June. If 
he had been trying to thank us, he could not 
have done it more gracefully. 

The worse the weather, the better we enjoyed 
the birds' society; and the better, in general, 
they seemed to appreciate our efforts on their 
behalf. It was noticeable, however, that chicka- 
dees were with us comparatively little during 
high, cold winds. On the 18th of February, for 



92 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

example, we had a blizzard, with driving snow, 
the most inclement day of the winter. At seven 
o'clock, when I looked out, four downy wood- 
peckers were in the elm, all trying their best to 
eat, though the branches shook till it was hard 
work to hold on. They stayed much of the 
forenoon. At ten o'clock, when the storm 
showed signs of abating, though it was still wild 
enough, a chickadee made his appearance and 
whistled Phoebe again and again — "a long 
time," my note says — in his cheeriest manner. 
Who can help loving a bird so courageous, " so 
frolic, stout, and self-possest " ? Emerson k did 
well to call him a " scrap of valor." Yet I find 
from a later note that " there were nothing like 
the usual number of chickadees so long as the 
fury lasted." Doubtless most of them stayed 
among the evergreens. It is an old saying of 
the chickadee's, frequently quoted, " Be bold, 
be bold, but not too bold." On the same day I 
saw a member of the household snowballing an 
English sparrow away from one branch, while 
a downy woodpecker continued to feed upon the 
next one. The woodpecker had got the right 
idea of things. Honest folk need not fear the 
constable. 



XX 

WATCHING THE PROCESSION 

It begins to go by my door about the first of 
March, and is three full months in passing. The 
participants are all in uniform, each after his 
kind, some in the brightest of colors, some in 
Quakerish grays and browns. They seem not to 
stand very strictly upon the order of their com- 
ing ; red-coats and blue-coats travel side by side. 
Like the flowers, they have a calendar of their 
own, and in their own way are punctual, but 
their movements are not to be predicted with 
anything like mathematical nicety. Of some 
companies of them I am never certain which will 
precede the other, just as I can never tell 
whether, in a particular season, the anemone or 
the five-finger will come first into bloom. They 
need no bands of music, no drum-corps nor fif ers. 
The whole procession, indeed, is itself a band of 
music, a grand army of singers and players on 
instruments. They sing many tunes ; each uni- 
form has a tune of its own, but, unlike what 



94 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

happens in military and masonic parades, there 
is never any jangling, no matter how near to- 
gether the different bands may be marching. 

As I said, the pageant lasts for three months. 
It is fortunate for me, perhaps, that it lasts no 
longer ; for the truth is, I have grown so fond 
of watching it that I find it hard to attend to 
my daily work so long as the show continues. 
If I go inside for half a day, to read or to write, 
I am all the time thinking of what is going on 
outside. Who knows what I may be missing at 
this very minute ? I keep by me a prospectus 
of the festival, a list of all who are expected to 
take part in it, and, like most watchers of such 
parades, I have my personal favorites for whom 
I am always on the lookout. One thing troubles 
me : there is never a year that I do not miss a 
good many (a had many, I feel like saying) of 
those whose names appear in the announcements. 
Some of them, indeed, I have never seen. If 
they are really in the ranks, it must be that their 
numbers are very small; for the printed pro- 
gramme tells exactly how they will be dressed, 
and I am sure I should recognize them if they 
came within sight. Some of them, I fancy, do 
not keep their engagements. 

I spoke, to begin with, of their passing my 
door. But I spoke figuratively. Some, it is 



WATCHING THE PROCESSION 95 

true, do pass my door, and even tarry for a day 
or two under my windows, but to see others I 
have to go into the woods. Some I find only in 
deep, almost impenetrable swamps, dodging in 
and out among thick bushes and cat-tails. A 
good many follow the coast. I watch them run- 
ning along the sea-beach on the edge of the surf, 
or walking sedately over muddy flats where I 
need rubber boots in which to follow them. 
Some are silent during the day, but as darkness 
comes on indulge in music and queer aerial 
dancing. 

Many travel altogether by night, resting and 
feeding in the daytime. It is pleasant to stand 
out of doors in the evening, and hear them call- 
ing to each other overhead as they hasten north- 
ward ; for at this time of the year, I have forgot- 
ten to say, they are always traveling in a northerly 
direction. 

The procession, as such, has no definite ter- 
minus. It breaks up gradually by the dropping 
out of its members here and there. Each of 
them knows pretty well where he is going. This 
one, who came perhaps from Cuba, means to stop 
in Massachusetts; that one, after a winter in 
Central America, has in view a certain swamp or 
meadow, or, it may be, some mountain-top, in 
New Hampshire ; another will not be at home till 



96 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

he reaches the furthermost coast of Labrador or 
the banks of the Saskatchewan. The prospectus 
of which I spoke, and of which every reader 
ought to have a copy, tells, in a general way, 
whither each company is bound, but the members 
of the same company often scatter themselves 
over several degrees of latitude. 

Some of the companies move compactly, and 
are only two or three days, more or less, in pass- 
ing a given point. You must be in the woods, 
for example, on the 12th or 13th of May, or you 
will miss them altogether. Others straggle along 
for a whole month. You begin to think, perhaps, 
that they mean to stay with you all summer, but 
some morning you wake up to the fact that the 
last one has gone. 

It is curious how few people see this army of 
travelers. They pass by thousands and hundreds 
of thousands. More than a hundred different 
companies go through every town in Massa- 
chusetts between March 1 and June 1. They 
dress gayly — not a few of them seem to have 
borrowed Joseph's coat — and are full of music, 
yet somehow their advent excites little remark. 
Perhaps it is because, for the most part, they flit 
from bush to bush and from tree to tree, here 
one and there one. If some year they should 
form in line, and move in close order along the 



WATCHING THE PROCESSION 97 

public streets, what a stir they would excite ! For 
a day or two the newspapers would be full of 
the sensation, and possibly the baseball reporters 
would be compelled for once to shorten their ac- 
counts of Battum's " wonderful left-hand catch" 
and Ketchum's " phenomenal slide to the second 
base." It is just as well, I dare say, that nothing 
oi this kind should ever happen, for it is hard to 
see how the great reading public could bear even 
the temporary loss of such interesting and instruc- 
tive narratives. 

Meantime, though the greater part of the peo- 
ple pay no heed to these " birds of passage," 
some of us are never tired of watching them. I 
myself used to be fond of gazing at military and 
political parades. In my time I have seen a good 
many real soldiers and a good many make-believes. 
But as age comes on, I find myself, rightly or 
wrongly, caring less and less for such spectacles. 
It will never be so, I think, with the procession 
of which I am now writing. I have never watched 
it with more enthusiasm than this very year. It 
is only just over, but I am already beginning 
to count upon its autumnal return, and by the 
middle of August shall be looking every day for 
its advance couriers. 

Till then I shall please myself with observing 
the ways of such of the host as have happened 
6 



98 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

to drop out of the procession in my immediate 
neighborhood. One of them I can hear singing 
at this very moment. He and his wife spent the 
winter in Mexico, as well as I can determine, and 
have been back with us since the 11th of May. 
They have pitched their tent for the summer in 
the top of a tall elm directly in front of my door, 
and just now are much occupied with household 
cares. The little husband ( Vireo gilvus he is 
called in the official programme, but I have heard 
him spoken of, not inappropriately, as the war- 
bling vireo) takes upon himself his full share of 
the family drudgery, and it is very pretty indeed 
to see him sitting in the tent and singing at his 
work. He sets us all, as I think, an excellent 
example. 



XXI 

SOUTHWARD BOUND 

While walking through a piece of pine wood, 
three or four days ago, I was delighted to put 
my eye unexpectedly upon a hummingbird's nest. 
The fairy structure was placed squarely upon the 
upper surface of a naked, horizontal branch, and 
looked so fresh, trimmed outwardly with bits of 
gray lichen, that I felt sure it must have been 
built this year. But where now were the birds 
that built it, and the nestlings that were hatched 
in it ? Who could tell ? In imagination I saw the 
mother sitting upon the tiny, snow-white eggs, 
and then upon the two little ones — little ones, 
indeed, no bigger than bumble-bees at first. I 
saw her feeding them day by day, as they grew 
larger and larger, till at last the cradle was get- 
ting too narrow for them, and they were ready to 
make a trial of their wings. But where were they 
now ? Not here, certainly. For a fortnight I had 
been passing down this path almost daily, and 
not once had I seen a hummingbird. 

LofC. 



100 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

No, they are not here, and even as I write I 
seem to see the little family on their way to the 
far south. They are making the journey by easy 
stages, I hope — flitting from flower-bed to flower- 
bed, now in Connecticut, now in New Jersey, and 
so on through Pennsylvania and the Southern 
States. Will they cross the water to the West 
Indies, as some of their kind are said to do ? or, 
less adventurous, will they keep straight on to 
some mountain-side in Costa Rica, or even in 
Brazil ? I should be sorry to believe that the 
parent birds took their departure first, leaving 
the twin children to find their way after them as 
best they could — as those who have paid ipost 
attention to such matters assure us that many of 
our birds are in the habit of doing. But how- 
ever they go, and wherever they end their long 
journey, may wind and weather be favorable, and 
old and young alike return, after the winter is 
over, to build other nests here in their native 
New England. 

This passing of birds back and forth, a grand 
semi-annual tide, is to me a thing of wonder. I 
think of the millions of sandpipers and plovers 
which for two months (it is now late in Septem- 
ber) have been pouring southward along the sea- 
coast. Some of them passed here on their way 
north no longer ago than the last days of May. 



SOUTHWARD BOUND 101 

They went far up toward the Arctic circle, but 
before the end of July they were back again, 
hastening to the equator. The golden plover, 
we are told, travels from Greenland to Pata- 
gonia. 

All summer the golden warblers were singing 
within sound of my windows. As I walked I saw 
them flitting in and out of the roadside bushes, 
beautiful and delicate creatures. But before the 
first of September the last of them disappeared. 
I did not see them depart. They took wing in 
the night, and almost before I suspected it they 
were gone. They will winter in Central or South 
America, and, within a week of May-day, we shall 
have them here again, as much at home as if they 
had never left us. 

They were gone before the first of September, 
I said. But I was thinking of those which had 
summered in Massachusetts. In point of fact, I 
saw a golden warbler only ten days ago. He was 
with a mixed flock of travelers, and, in all like- 
lihood, had come from the extreme north ; for 
this dainty, blue-eyed warbler is common in sum- 
mer, not only throughout the greater part of the 
United States, but on the very shores of the Arc- 
tic Ocean. So he voyages back and forth, living 
his life from land to land, as Tennyson says, led 
by who knows what impulse ? 



102 EVERYDAY BIRDS 

" Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green, 
Thy sky is ever clear ; 
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, 
No winter in thy year." 



It is worth giving a little time daily to what is 
called ornithology to be able to greet such wan- 
derers as they come and go. For some days now 
a few Western palm warblers have been paying 
us a visit, and, though the town has never com- 
missioned me to that office, I have taken it upon 
myself to do them the honors. They have met 
me halfway, at least, as the everyday expression 
is ; yielding readily to my enticements, and more 
than once coming near enough to show me their 
white lower eyelids, so that I might be quite sure 
of their identity. A little later the Eastern palm 
warbler will be due, and I hope to find him equally 
complaisant ; for I wish to see his lower eyelid, 
also, which is yellow instead of white. 

At this time of the year, indeed, there is no 
lack of such interesting and well-dressed stran- 
gers, no matter where we may go. The woods 
are alive with them by day, and the air by night. 
There are few evenings when you may not hear 
them calling overhead as they hasten southward. 
Men who have watched them through telescopes, 
pointed at the full moon, have calculated their 
height at one or two miles. One observer saw 



SOUTHWARD BOUND 103 

more than two hundred cross the moon's disk in 
two hours. The greater part passed so swiftly as 
to make it impossible to say more than that they 
were birds ; but others, flying at a greater alti- 
tude, and therefore traversing the field of vision 
less rapidly, were identified as blackbirds, rails, 
snipe, and ducks. Another observer plainly 
recognized swallows, warblers, goldfinches, and 
woodpeckers. 

All over the northern hemisphere to-night, in 
America, Europe, and Asia, countless multitudes 
of these wayfarers will be coursing the regions of 
the upper air ; and to-morrow, if we go out with 
our eyes open, we shall find, here and there, busy 
little flocks of stragglers that have stopped by 
the way to rest and feed : sparrows, snowbirds, 
kinglets, nuthatches, chickadees, thrushes, war- 
blers, wrens, and what not, a few of them singing, 
and every one of them evidently in love with life, 
and full of happy expectations. 



INDEX 



Bittern : — 

American, 68. 

least, 78. 
Blackbird, red-winged, 86. 
Bluebird, 44, 59, 83. 
Bob White, 85. 
Bobolink, 86. 
Butcher-bird, 19, 86. 

Catbird, 86. 

Cedar-bird, 84. 

Chickadee, 7, 12, 83, 88, 91, 

92. 
Chimney swift, 56, 63. 
Creeper, brown, 10, 91. 
Crossbill, white-winged, 87. 
Crow, 44, 49, 83. 

Flicker, 64, 84. 

Goldfinch, 84. 
Grosbeak : — 

cardinal, 25. 

rose-breasted, 36, 40. 
Grouse, 85. 

Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 51, 

63, 84, 99. 

Indigo-bird, 86. 
Jay, blue, 43, 83, 90. 



Kingbird, 47, 85. 
Kinglet : — 

golden-crowned, 1, 91. 

ruby-crowned, 1. 

Migration, 93, 99. 
Mockingbird, 16. 

Nighthawk, 60. 
Nuthatch : — 

red-breasted, 90. 



Oriole, Baltimore, 83. 

Partridge, 85. 
Plover, golden, 101. 
Plovers, 100. 
Purple finch, 36, 37. 

Redpoll linnet, 87. 
Robin, 83. 

Sandpipers, 100. 
Shrike : — 

great northern, 19, 86. 

loggerhead, 21. 
Snipe, 61. 

Snowbird (junco), 36, 59, 86. 
Sparrow : — 

chipping, 30, 31. 

English, 30, 92. 



106 



INDEX 



field, 30, 32, 36, 37. 
fox, 36, 37. 
Ipswich, 38. 
savanna, 26, 38. 
song, 26, 36, 37, 39, 83. 
tree, 36, 37, 38. 
vesper, 26, 36, 37, 39. 
white-throated, 36, 37, 38. 
Swift, chimney, 56, 63. 

Tanager : — 

scarlet, 22, 85. 

southern, 25. 
Thrasher, brown, 15, 86. 



Vireo, warbling, 98. 

Vireos, 84. 

Vulture, California, 1, 4. 

Warbler : — 

golden, 101. 

palm, 102. 
Warblers, 84. 
Wax wing, cedar, 84. 
Whip-poor-will, 60. 
Woodcock, 61. 
Woodpecker : — 

downy, 89, 92. 

golden- winged, 64, 84. 



ElectrotyPed and printed by H. O. Houghton <5r* Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 



May- 7. 1|K>1 



APR £9 1901 



